By Znar Shino
Rudaw TV correspondent in Budapest
I was on the train that departed from Budapest, Hungary, to the German border on Thursday. There were around 650 refugees and migrants who had bought tickets some days in advance at the main station. They all wanted to reach Germany.
Most of the passengers were from Syria. There were also Afghans, Pakistanis, North Africans and a small number of Kurds from the Kurdistan region.
About 50 minutes outside Budapest, the train stopped at a small town. Hungarian police lined up on the platform and some entered the train. They wanted all refugees and migrants off before the train could move.
A standoff ensued: the refugees refused to leave the train. They turned away food and water offered to them. Some hadn’t eaten for seven hours.
A Syrian man and his wife threw themselves on the tracks with their little baby right in front of the train, refusing to leave unless the police allowed them on the train to continue their journey.
Many journalists were turned away by the police. I hid myself among the people on the train in order to avoid detection.
On the train that day, the refugees had all heard about Alan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Kurdish body who drowned with his family near the Turkish shores. They were very sad, but their own situation was tragic, too. 
The refugees all want to leave Hungary. They wanted to reach Germany, Sweden, Norway and Western Europe.
I have spent two weeks with these migrants and refugees. I met them in Greece and have travelled with them through Macedonia, Serbia and Hungary.
Many times I contacted the office of the Hungarian prime minister, interior minister and other authorities to see if they had any plans for these people. No one gave me any answers.
On the train that day, the refugees had all heard about Alan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Kurdish body who drowned with his family near the Turkish shores. They were very sad, but their own situation was tragic, too.
Some refugees told me of a family of 10 from which only two had made it safely to Hungary. The rest were lost on the way either in the forests or in the sea. Some of the migrants didn’t know what had happened to the friends and family they started their journey with.
In Bulgaria, the police had robbed some of them. Smugglers had even less mercy. Many refugees were robbed and beaten along the way.
Budapest is now a major smuggling hub. Even ordinary people try to make a quick buck by putting refugees in their cars and taking them to Western Europe. But now the refugees are scared after what happened to the 71 people who suffocated to death in the back of a truck in Austria.
The smugglers are bold. They don’t fear the police and authorities any more. They openly hunt for customers among the crowd, usually using agents. They avoid the crowd themselves and sit on its fringes.
Near me on the train sat a 70-year-old Syrian man. He was from the Golan Heights. He had been wounded in a bomb attack in Damascus. He had a son in Germany and wanted to reunite with him.
A few seats over, a pregnant woman was suffering. Not far from her, the baby of another woman was crying nonstop. A young man of about 25 was lying in the middle of the isle and people walked over him.
Budapest is now a major smuggling hub. Even ordinary people try to make a quick buck by putting refugees in their cars and taking them to Western Europe. Some Hungarians are deeply worried about this giant wave of refugees and migrants. An old man said he was worried that the refugees, most of whom are Muslims, will change the image, culture and social structure of his country and the rest of Europe.
Yet in the city center I saw a 22-year-old Hungarian woman who walked among the refugees and gave them food and water. She said the people had suffered enough already. She said they needed to be helped and cared for until they had a chance to one day return to their home countries.
Another Hungarian who had three children came to the city center every day and helped the exhausted refugees. She was there every day. When the refugees refused to go into the official camps, she persuaded them to move to parks and live in the shade of the trees.
The migrants had each paid $138 for the ticket from Budapest to Munich. I met a man who had paid $1,226 for his whole family. It is easy to buy the ticket, but it doesn’t guarantee arrival in your destination.
At the window, the ticket master tells them that their tickets are non-refundable. Some tickets are good for two weeks.
In the crowd, there were people who had come from Sweden, Germany, Britain and other countries to look for their relatives and make sure they had safely arrived in Hungary or to find a safe way to get them to Western Europe.
I came across a man from Kirkuk who deeply regretted his journey. He wanted to return home and I gave him the address of the Iraqi Embassy in Budapest. The few Kurds from the Kurdistan region also seemed to have changed their minds and wished they hadn’t taken this perilous journey.
But the Syrians had no choice; no place to return to. The Syrians told me that in Syria they had to either join President Bashar al-Assad’s army, the Islamic State (ISIS) or Jabhat al-Nusra.
“In Syria, we will be killed anyway by one group or another, so we might as well die here,” a young man from Homs told me.