New Lines Magazine reports:

Dawood remembers the disgust in the eyes of the Turkish security guards in the deportation center where he was held last year. “I felt like humanity had died,” said the soft-spoken Syrian man in his 30s, who is identified by a pseudonym to protect his safety. “They just kept shouting: ‘You are like animals! We’re tired of you. If you are a man, go back to Syria and fight!’”

The humiliation hit hard for Dawood, who does not lack courage or love for his country. Back in Syria, he volunteered as a rescue worker for the Syrian Civil Defence, also known as the White Helmets. For five years, Dawood dashed into burning buildings that had been bombed by the Bashar al-Assad regime and the Russians, risking his own life to save others, before finally escaping the Syrian province of Idlib in 2022 and settling in Istanbul — without valid papers.

“I tried to explain to those guards what Syrians have experienced,” Dawood told this reporter during an interview from the Syrian restaurant where he is now hiding. “But they said: ‘We don’t care. If you are going to die, just go die in Syria.’”

Dawood had ended up in the deportation center located just outside the Turkish city of Gaziantep after being apprehended while trying to cross illegally from Turkey into Bulgaria in September 2023. As he arrived at the facility close to the Syrian border on a bus packed with other Syrians, he saw a massive five-story complex surrounded by long walls topped with metal fences and barbed wire. By the entrance stood a faded sign that read, “This project is co-financed by the European Union.”

Upon arrival, Dawood had his phone confiscated and was told to queue up in front of a room. As he waited his turn, he recalled, the man who had stood in line in front of him was dragged out of the room by two plainclothes police officers and beaten up. Dawood was called in next. Inside the room, a woman in her 30s with dyed blonde hair sat behind a computer and told him to sign “some standard paperwork” to be able to retrieve his confiscated belongings later on. Dawood looked at the form in front of him and spotted the words “voluntary return to the Syrian Arab Republic.”

“I then told that woman that I want to speak to a lawyer, but she said that there’s no time for such things with so many people waiting in line,” Dawood recalled. “When I insisted, she began to threaten me, saying, ‘Do you really want me to call those police officers again?’”

Dawood’s account is not an aberrant incident. It is the dark side of the way that the EU outsources its migration management to third countries, and then looks the other way when refugees’ rights are violated. [Continue reading…]