Four Afghan refugees are stranded in Syria’s Idlib after being deported by Turkey

Four Afghans are stranded in north-western Syria after Turkish authorities deported them from Turkey, as reports continue to emerge of Ankara forcibly deporting refugees to Syria.

The stranded young Afghan men – 18 year old Khiyali Gul, 22 year old Nasratullah, 23 year old Safiallah and 25 year old Attaallah – spoke to the London-based news organisation, Middle East Eye, from Syria’s opposition-held Idlib province, revealing that they made their way from the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad following the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in August last year.

The four men eventually made it to the Turkish capital, Ankara, where they were then picked up by Turkish authorities and then deported to Idlib through the Khirbet Al-Joz border crossing. That was despite the fact that “We told the Turkish authorities that we were Afghans,” said Nasratullah.

He added that “The police caught us and we were persecuted … We begged them to send us to Greece. They said they would send us to Greece or Afghanistan but they sent us to Syria.”

Following their deportation, they were immediately arrested by Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), the opposition militant group which controls most of Idlib. It was only after a month of detention, when they finally convinced HTS that they were not Iranian agents and were, instead, in support of the Syrian revolution, that they were released by the group.

READ: Turkey strengthens border defences to prevent influx of Afghanistan immigrants

Since then, they have lived under the supervision of a local people smuggler in a temporary shelter in the village of Qah in northern Idlib, where they are attempting to find work and gain enough money to make another attempt to cross the Turkish border and continue to Europe.

Smugglers are an essential part of the journey made by refugees, migrants and asylum seekers, with the men’s initial trip already having taken “a month to travel from Afghanistan to Turkey via Iran for $1,100,” said Safiullah.

With smugglers reportedly attempting to use the lucrative charges to bribe Turkish border guards or to take them through tunnels under the border, it is often a risky attempt to make. “We have failed to jump across the border wall without a smuggler, and the border guards shot at us twice,” Nasratullah said. “When we crossed it the third time, the border guards arrested us and brought us back to Syria even though we told them we were Afghans.”

The plight of the four stranded Afghans comes at a time when reports have increasingly emerged over the months that Turkish authorities have forcibly deported over 155,000 Syrian refugees to northern Syria over the past few years in a secretive campaign.

The Afghan men are also not the only non-Syrians who have been deported to Syria by Turkey, as nine Iranians were reported to have been deported to northern Syria last year after they claimed to be Syrians while trying to cross into Europe.

READ: Turkish ultranationalists should know that Assad is their enemy, not Syrian refugees