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Many moons ago, 18-year-old Mahmoud Taffash landed in Lesbos. The year was 2015. For the fresh-faced Syrian, as for the thousands of other refugees who arrived on the eastern Aegean island at the height of Syria’s civil war, the crunch of the pebbles on a beach, reached on a dinghy from Turkey, marked the start of his journey west.
“It was move forward and rest, move forward and rest,” the 27-year-old recalled of the odyssey that would eventually take him from the uncertainty of a conflict zone to the tranquillity of Hamburg. “And all about looking ahead.”
But last week Taffash, a soon-to-be German citizen, was back in Greece – the country where his journey began – for all the wrong reasons.
“I came to help my friend Kassem,” said the civil engineering student, embracing his best buddy who also fled Syria via Greece eight years ago. “He is worried sick about his wife, Esra, who was on the boat. She had gone to Libya with her brother to meet the smuggler [network]. As soon as we heard about the shipwreck, we took a plane and came here.”
They are not alone. On Saturday, both were among the countless relatives and friends who, desperate for news of loved ones on the doomed vessel, had converged on the neoclassical building that houses the Hellenic coastguard in this port town. Like the two Syrians, nearly everyone in the almost exclusively male group belonged to an earlier wave of migrants and refugees who had reached Europe, often after perilous journeys that had finally seen them settle in countries across the continent. And, like them, their response to the tragedy has been one of unalloyed shock.
“All we want to know is whether he is alive or dead,” said Ahsan Muhammad, a Pakistani farm worker whose cousin, Musa, was on the ship when it went down with as many as 750 on board off Greece’s southern coast early on Wednesday. “Families back home, mothers who gave birth to these children, are asking, asking, asking. They need to know.”
By the weekend – four days after the 25-metre fishing trawler capsized en route to Italy – there was little pretence that the list of survivors would grow beyond the 104 men already rescued, despite patrol boats continuing to scour the seas where the sinking occurred.
Instead, the incident was being described as the Mediterranean nation’s worst maritime disaster in modern times, with officials acknowledging that more than 500 people – from Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan and Pakistan – were now presumed dead. For the close family members who had flown in from the UK, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany, hopes of finding loved ones have almost evaporated.
The grim process of providing DNA samples – conducted on Saturday by coastguard officials – had become more about identifying the 78 bodies recovered by authorities than passengers likely to be found in some of the deepest waters in the Mediterranean. Survivors, with the exception of around 20 people who remain in hospital, have touched base with loved ones.
“There were 10 people from my village in [the Pakistani district of] Mandi Bahauddin who paid smugglers around €5,000 to be on that boat,” sighed Arshad Muhammad, standing outside the coastguard building with photocopies of the passports and identity cards of fellow Pakistanis who were on the fated vessel.
“Their parents have asked us to be here. They were the young ones when we were growing up. In Pakistan, you know, families sell animals, land, even their cars to pay for kids to make these journeys. They sacrifice everything, and now mothers in Mandi Bahauddin have no idea whether their children are dead or alive.”
The 31-year-old walked through the mountain passes of Pakistan, Iran and Turkey to reach Greece over a decade ago. “It was hard. We were on foot for three months, today you get smuggled easier,” he said in near faultless Greek.
“I like this country very much. Me and Ahsan work in greenhouses here in the Peloponnese. I earn €40 a day and I send money back to my family. So many on that boat wanted our life.”
The two farm workers were not alone in being on a mission to find answers for the kith and kin of passengers believed to have first boarded the trawler in Egypt before it stopped in the Tobruk area of Libya on 9 June.
Last week, Amjad and Ahmed Ali, brothers from Derby, also flew out to Greece after their father, who arrived in the UK in 1957, was beseeched by panic-stricken friends in Pakistan to help find relatives on the vessel.
“We have a list of names and are here as good Samaritans,” said Amjad, who runs fast-food outlets in the Midlands. “We know of a man who sold his house to pay the smuggler agents. We’re talking about poverty-stricken people who are distraught.”
It was, he said, vital that Greek authorities recovered the boat, which is thought to be lying on the seabed in waters that are more than 5,000 metres deep.
“It is a nasty business this smuggling. They really need to find it if there is ever going to be closure. Not to [find the boat] means families living in hope for years that loved ones will make contact. That will only feed the narrative of traffickers who will continue exploiting them.”
Fear and uncertainty haunted Kassem last week as the 34-year-old Syrian, who has lived in Hamburg since 2015, sought news of Esra, the “wonderful girl” he married barely two years ago.
The great irony, he lamented, was that the 21-year-old had not needed to be on the vessel. “I could have brought her over, legally, if the government hadn’t stipulated that she passed a test in basic German,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes. “But she couldn’t read or write and so couldn’t pass any test.”
In desperation, Kassem, who has long worked with the courier firm, DHL, resorted to a smuggling network, looking up “the best way” to reach Italy from Libya on Facebook. “This Egyptian network came up and we began chatting. I paid them $4,500. Esra and I so wanted to be together and now I have no idea where she is.”
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