Syrians in Turkey - New York Times

Syrians in Turkey: The Human Smuggler and the Young Refugee

By
PATRICK KINGSLEY
MARCH 24, 2017
After earning $800,000 in 2015 by sneaking migrants out of Turkey, a smuggler says he has left the guilt and complications of his business behind — mostly. And a Syrian refugee boy, homeless and out of school, must keep roaming the country to find farm work and help his family survive. This is the third part in the State of Emergency series, in which our correspondent takes us behind the scenes of today’s Turkey, a nation in crisis.
Abu Mohammed is bored. He estimates that two years ago he earned more than $800,000 from smuggling thousands of migrants into Greece from Turkey. He rented an office in Aksaray, an area of Istanbul popular with Syrians, to serve as his headquarters. At one point, he had more than 80,000 missed calls from prospective customers.

Today, his phone doesn’t ring so often. He no longer rents the office. Occasionally he gazes at it from the street below.
Migration between Turkey and Greece has fallen by more than 95 percent since the peak of the refugee crisis in late 2015. And with it, Abu Mohammed’s business has collapsed.
Since early 2016, Balkan countries have made it harder for people to migrate through Europe, lowering the demand for Abu Mohammed’s services. Turkey has also made it harder for smugglers to work, detaining men like Abu Mohammed for several weeks last year. For this article, he agreed to talk only if his face was obscured in photographs and he was identified by his nickname alone.

I have interviewed more than a dozen smugglers on three continents. Like most of them, Abu Mohammed is more complex than journalists and politicians usually suggest in their portrayal of the human-smuggling industry.

He grew up in Syria, and became a surgeon’s assistant — someone who once saved lives instead of, as some say, endangering them. He turned to smuggling only once he had fled to Turkey, after he himself almost drowned trying to reach Europe as a passenger. Later, his own passengers were not simply his customers: They included relatives, and even his young son. Sending them to sea, he says, was stressful and sometimes frightening.

It was also shameful, he says. Though he acknowledges a quiet pride in his role in such an extraordinary flow of people, which was “not an ordinary thing,” it’s now not something he wants to be associated with. “It’s a dirty business,” he says. “It’s hard to find someone who’s honest in this work.”
Like many smugglers, Abu Mohammed saw himself as the one honest broker among a crowd of liars — acknowledging the wider moral problems within his industry, but skirting his own personal agency. Today, he says he avoids the places where he used to close his deals.

We stroll through Aksaray, Istanbul’s main smuggling hub, and Abu Mohammed points out cafes where he no longer meets clients. Shops that no longer sell life jackets. A small park where refugees no longer sleep rough.
Life is slower for Abu Mohammed now, but it is less stressful. He says he does not miss the late-night calls from panicked customers, who sometimes phoned him from the sea itself. In fact, it is Abu Mohammed who now badgers his onetime clients. Of the roughly $800,000 he said he earned in 2015, around a quarter has yet to be paid by refugees who promised to pay once they reached Europe.

Still, he has made enough to change jobs for the third time in his life. Now he plans to use his profits to buy a cafe. He has started scouting potential places.
But does a smuggler ever really leave smuggling? A few days after we met, Turkish politicians threatened to encourage a new wave of migrants to reach Europe — and I wondered if Abu Mohammed thought he might soon be back in business.

If Turkey can “at least turn a blind eye to those who are trying to get smuggled,” he replied, “we will take care of the rest.” He giggled as he said it.

Kamal Shoumali contributed reporting.