“Hello there, how are you, yes we are in London,” came the joking reply from Shiva Mohammad Panahi, mother of three. “What crossing?… We are in a camp.” Then her husband Rasul Iran Nejad chips in and says they are in a camp near the Belgian border.
Two days after this light-hearted conversation, Shiva, her husband, and their three children made an attempt to reach Britain in a polyester amateur fishing boat. The family drowned in the Channel on October 27.
Rahim, who agreed to speak to Rudaw English from the port of Calais on the condition that his real identity is withheld, became friends with the family one week before the tragedy. The family and Rahim both came from Iran’s Sardasht area and they quickly bonded.
Speaking to family and friends, Rudaw English has pieced together the journey of this young Kurdish family who travelled thousands of kilometers, dreaming of a better life, only to meet their death in the cold waters of the English Channel.
The family started their journey in late May, heading to Turkey on their way to Europe, according to Keyvan, a pseudonym for an immediate cousin who also asked his name be withheld. Keyvan, who lives in Sardasht, said he did not want to incur the wrath of the Iranian authorities in case they don’t like what he says.
The father, Rasul, 35, was a construction worker and had little formal education. Three years ago, the Iranian authorities shut vital border crossings with Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, which was a source of income for thousands of families in the Sardasht area of West Azerbaijan province.
Rasul survived by doing manual labour, but as the country’s economic situation declined, work became scarce. Rahim, meanwhile, barely finished primary school and was making a living carrying goods on his back across the mountains.
“The economic pressure is high on us. The currency has become worthless,” Keyvan said from Iran. “The sanctions that America has imposed on the Iranian economy are the main reason. The economic sanctions have impacted every individual.”
Rahim blames the clerical establishment for the misery the Iranian people have found themselves in, and not the United States. “The American sanctions are because of the Mullahs [the clerics], otherwise why would America impose sanctions?” he said.
He was one of an estimated 70,000 Iranian Kurds who trek in the mountainous border region carrying untaxed goods on their backs to make a living for their deprived families. Hundreds of them are killed or wounded every year as a result of direct shooting by border guards or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), or they die in natural disasters and the harsh mountainous conditions.
Sardasht’s economy has suffered under decades of marginalization of the Kurdish region by the central government and lack of meaningful investment, coupled with government corruption and mismanagement. The weak economy quickly deteriorated further under US-imposed sanctions. Life became unbearable for many young Kurds like Rahim and Rasul who dreamt of living with dignity somewhere else.
A search for work and a better life is driving recent migration of Iranian Kurds to Western countries, who have fled in the tens of thousands over the past four decades, largely for political reasons.
It is not clear what triggered Rasul to think about leaving Iran last May, but his wife Shiva appeared to have a role in persuading him. “Two of her sisters and one brother live in Europe and I think she egged him on to leave,” said his cousin Keyvan.
Rasul’s family, including his brothers, was unhappy with the decision, but the 35-year-old laborer had made up his mind. He was determined to reach Europe at any cost. He sold his house and furniture for around 250 million tomans, just over 15,000 dollars, and borrowed another 500 million from friends and relatives, according to Keyvan.
“I am fed up when I think about this life, I can’t bear it but I have no choice… I will go and leave my Kurdistan,” Rasul sings a melancholic tune in a video filmed in the winter of 2019 and shared by his family. Around two dozen friends and relatives listen to him sing with his baby son Artin next to him and his other son Armin dancing. “Look at what happened to me because of poverty… I will go and leave my sweet city, I am about to leave my sweet city.”
Rasul had a passport, but to save money he decided to cross the border into Turkey illegally, according to his cousin. “Travelling to Turkey officially costs around 25 million tomans for five people, but illegally he only paid around 10 million tomans. He was trying to save money for his trip,” Keyvan told Rudaw English on Thursday. “I think he crossed the border in the Maku area into Turkey.”
The closure of the borders because of the coronavirus pandemic may have also been a factor with Rasul’s decision to make the crossing illegally.
In their first attempt, the family failed to cross the border and returned to Sardasht. Two weeks later, they set off again and reached Istanbul in late July. They appear to have stayed in Turkey for a month before they embarked on a nine day journey across the sea to Italy.
“The journey from Turkey on a 13 meter long boat was pleasant,” Rasul would tell his co-traveller Rahim in Calais in October. The sea had been calm. “When they got to Italy they were fingerprinted and quarantined for 15 days,” Rahim said.
Rahim himself arrived in Italy from Turkey in July and by the time he reached Calais he had spent 8,000 euros as a single man paying smugglers along the way.
He has already paid another 2,500 pounds to a smuggler to cross the Channel. “People pay somewhere between 2,000 to 3,000 pounds to smugglers to cross to Britain, depending on how new the boat and its engine are,” Rahim said, adding that most of the smugglers are Afghans with some Kurds among them. “For new boats with new engines, you pay 3,000 pounds. For an old boat with an old engine you pay 2,000 pounds.”
Rahim believes it took the family two days to reach France from Italy and head to Calais where he met them around the 20th of October.
“It was Rasul’s dream to reach Britain,” said Rahim. “He could not stay in France because he would have been deported back to Italy due to his fingerprints.”
Rahim stayed with the family in a camp, singing songs and playing games. “They wanted to go to Britain because they had fingerprints in Italy. They also had no money. All they had was 5,500 euros,” Rahim recalled.
Rahim left the family and headed to the Jungle, a refugee camp in Calais that the French police have tried to clear several times. From the Jungle, migrants, including Arabs, Kurds, Iranians, and Africans, set off for the UK.
It is believed the family made multiple attempts to cross the Channel. They tried on Sunday, but failed. They tried again, fatefully, on Tuesday evening. The waves were high and the boat capsized, leaving at least seven people dead, including Shiva, Rasul, and their young family. Two other men, also from Sardasht, are missing and presumed dead in the waters.
The authorities in France and the UK have said they will crackdown on the smuggling routes and smugglers to stop the flow of migrants and avoid such tragedies.
Shiva’s sister Shirin travelled from Switzerland to Calais on Thursday to identify the bodies. The bodies of Rasul, Shiva, and two of their children were in the morgue. French police believe the body of little Artin may never be found.
Their family in Sardasht are worried they may not be able to bring back the bodies and bury them in their birthplace. “We asked the French authorities and the Iranian authorities to help, but they said they could not help,” Abubakr Irannejad, Rasul’s paternal uncle, told Rudaw English via telephone from Sardasht. “We have been told that it would cost 1.2 billion tomans (close to $43,000) just to bring them back to Turkey, but we don’t have that kind of money.”
The family is appealing for help to anyone who could offer any assistance in repatriating the bodies, the cousin Keyvan said.
For Rahim still in Calais, the death of his friends has not deterred him from trying to reach Britain’s shores. “My mother has asked me not to go to Britain after the tragedy, but I will go to the UK. I am just waiting for the sea to be calmer. Now the waves are too high,” he said. “I understand that seven people are dead, but I want to go to England and work.”
Additional reporting by Fuad Haghighi
