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Baghdad, Iraq – As the plane was circulating on the runway at Erbil Airport, after a three-hour flight from the Belarusian capital Minsk, Azad looked out the window, holding his wife’s hands.
“We will take off our hats, wear masks and leave the airport as soon as possible,” Azad Dohu, a 28-year-old man from the Kurdish city, told his wife.
After a failed attempt to enter the European Union from Belarus, they left bruises on their arms and with unbearable emotional pain, Azad and his wife asked not to receive a full name as they tried to keep it as little as possible, they told Al Jazeera. They were treated like animals on the Belarus-Poland border and did not want to be questioned again by journalists as soon as they returned to where they wanted to go.
“For now, we will try not to think too much about our future, as soon as we start thinking, it will become clear that we do not have one here in Kurdistan,” Azad Al Jazeera told him sitting in his house. In Dohuk. “But we both know we’re probably stuck here for the rest of our lives.”
Azad, along with another 430 Iraqis, returned last Thursday from a government-ordered return flight from Belarus to Iraq as part of an effort by the Iraqi government in recent years to ease tensions on the border between Belarus and Poland. months.
As most migrants and asylum seekers decided to stay in Belarus, with an increasingly low hope of ever being able to cross the border into Poland, others “left the naive hope that they could succeed” and decided to return home. said Azade.
‘Time to leave’
However, returning to Iraq was not an easy decision. Like many others who went to Belarus with the intention of joining the EU, Azad saved and asked for help from his family, and almost sold his house. When they heard that the Iraqi government was offering flights back home from Minsk to those who wanted to return voluntarily, their first reaction was a firm “no”.
“I remember telling my wife at night in our tent that we told her not to spend all the money and waste all that energy, that we would go back to Iraq,” Azad said. But the next day, there were regular clashes between Belarusian border forces and their Polish counterparts.
Azad said Belarusian police were pushing them to the other side of the border, and that Polish police would push them back.
“Back and forth, back and forth, they were playing like animals with us,” he said, remarkably angry. “That was the moment when we thought it was time to put that dream of going to Europe aside.”
What Azad described is only part of the ongoing political and humanitarian crisis on the EU’s eastern border. So far, at least 11 people have been killed in this border crisis, and many more are freezing temperatures and reducing essential supplies.
Despite efforts by the Belarussian government to transport migrants and asylum seekers to temporary shelters, it is still unclear how the government will resolve this crisis. Western politicians accuse Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of using migrants and asylum seekers as “weapons” as revenge against sanctions imposed by the EU on his government.
For many like Azad, simply waiting is no longer an option: they decided to return home. Now that they are back in Iraq, Azade said they were lucky not to have sold the house. But that’s also the last thing he has now: he sold sofas, a refrigerator, and even a cup of coffee. Basically, anything that could be turned into money to help get the odyssey out of Iraq was for sale.
Social media posts have also revealed a grim picture of what awaits those returning to the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. For example, a Kurdish family did not even have money for a taxi to take them from the airport to the camp of the displaced.
‘I had only one choice’
Although the Kurdish region, Iraqi Kurds and some Yazidis live in relative security and prosperity compared to the rest of Iraq, the people living in the region are experiencing increasing unemployment and endemic corruption. With the destruction of ISIL (ISIS) armed groups, they are still struggling to rebuild parts of the Kurdish and Yazidi communities.
Job opportunities are scarce and many young people like Azad do not see a future in the Kurdish region. “I tried and tried, but I couldn’t find a job, so the only option I had was to leave Erbil,” said another young Kurdish man in Belarus.
The provincial government, in the face of the difficulties many people face in the region, stressed that the migrant crisis was sparked by smugglers. However, many people who spoke to Al Jazeera said they voluntarily left their homes and went to Belarus with flights and visas organized by travel agencies.
For the 430 people who have returned to Iraq from Europe, their future is now more difficult than when they decided to embark on that journey a few months ago. Without government support, many are more desperate.
“I don’t expect the media to really care about us and I don’t think people can really understand what we’re going through, but I’m happy to be able to talk to someone,” Azad said, standing up. ending the floor and the conversation.
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