A choppy route to freedom

摘要

Just five nautical miles of turquoise sea separate Turkey from the tourist town of Molyvos, on the Greek island of Lesbos. But the boat got stuck halfway across, says 24-year-old Mohammed Mahmoud. He and a half-dozen university friends fled their bombed-out home town of Aleppo, Syria a month earlier, making their way across Turkey. In Izmir they each paid €1,000 ($1400) to smugglers who put them on a night bus with blacked-out windows, then ordered them out on a desolate hillside. They scrambled down to the water, young women clutching small children, and into a rubber dinghy, 54 in a boat made for 20. In mid-voyage the outboard motor died, says Mr Mahmoud: "We tried to fix it, but it fell off and sank."