The group are originally from Paveh in western Iran’s Kermanshah province, a friend of theirs, Zakariya Rostampour, said in an interview with Rudaw’s Kawar Saleh on Wednesday. In the hopes of reaching Europe, the men hired a smuggler, paying $12,000 each to be taken to Italy. They were arrested in Turkey and claimed to be Syrian, hoping they would not be deported, but instead they were sent to Syria.
The men, aged between 35 and 45 years, were travelling singly, without family members. Their family and friends have not heard from the group for 16 days, since they reached the Syrian border.
“I heard one more time from them when they were at the Syrian border. I asked them if they’re alive and they said yes. I also asked where they are and they answered at the Syrian border. The phone call immediately ended after that,” said Rostampour, speaking from Istanbul.
Rostampour, who also hails from Iran, said he spoke to the smuggler on Tuesday who had been in contact with an official in Azaz, a town in Syria, north of Aleppo.
“The human trafficker has the latest details. I talked to him yesterday and he said that he has talked to an officer in Azaz. It seems they have been in Azaz. The officer named numbers and said that for each person they need to receive $1,000 to $1,500 and they would be released,” he said.
This is the second group reportedly deported from Turkey to Syria and stranded in Azaz. More than 50 Kurdish migrants hoping to reach the United Kingdom from the Kurdistan Region spent nearly 10 days in Syria before the Iraqi government brought them home. They too had told Turkish officials that they were Syrian.
Among them was Mohammad Abdulrahman. He told Rudaw that more than 70 migrants were stranded in Azaz. “We had Iranians among us,” he said, but does not know what happened to them.
According to Rostampour, friends and relatives of the eight men have asked the Iranian embassy in Ankara for help.
Turkey hosts the world’s largest refugee population, including 3.7 million Syrians and is worried about a new influx of refugees from Afghanistan, fleeing the Taliban. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday told German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier that his country “did not have the capacity to shoulder a new burden of migration.”
