Source: Time

ByRebecca Collard/Erbil, Iraq

For the Doski family, the arrival to northern Iraq’s Erbil International Airport last week was bittersweet.

Fayez Al Doski waited with his wife and two children as immigration officers went over the one-way travel documents issued to them by the Iraqi embassy in Germany. Like tens of thousands of other asylum-seekers last year, he paid smugglers to take his family to Europe, joining the more than 86,000 Iraqis arrived on the shores of Greece in 2015 alone.

“I sold my car and I sold everything in my house,” says Doski. The family flew to Turkey, tossed their passports and paid smugglers $7,000 to get them to Germany. But it didn’t turn out to be the utopia they had imagined.

“It was horrible,” says Doski. He describes bad food and life in cramped quarters with other families from the Middle East, North Africa and Afghanistan. “The kids were having problems.”

It didn’t help that Doski wasn’t allowed to work. The family was left to depend on a stipend from the Germany government. Doski had big plans to get job, a home for his family, put his kids in a good school and start a new life, but it wasn’t that easy. And after four months in Germany, they gave up, saving the money from German stipend and buying tickets home to Iraq. “This is what’s left from $7,000,” he says, pulling out a couple bills at the arrivals gate in the airport. “Forty euro.”

The International Organization of Migration (IOM) assisted more than 1,000 Iraqi migrants voluntarily return from Europe in February alone, and some 5,000 since October of last year. In February the demand was so great that that IOM chartered a flight from Belgium to Baghdad to return 106 in one day. “Many of them tell us they did not find what they expected to,” says Sandra Black, a spokesperson for IOM in Iraq, which helps migrant families trying to return home from Europe.

Like the Doski family, many Iraqis in Germany didn’t wait for assistance and simply saved or borrowed money to buy they own tickets home—which means the number of returning Iraqis is likely much higher than the IOM figures. “There is no plane from Germany that doesn’t have them,” says a security guard in the arrivals hall.

In their home in Bardarash, about 20 miles east of Mosul, Doski shows the empty space where they used to have sofa. They sold that to finance the trip to Germany, along with his wife’s sewing machine and the bit of gold she had. “Now I feel embarrassed,” he says.

Doski shows videos of their dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean, with people on the boat praying to God as they see the Greek shores approach. He shows more pictures of the family in Germany, posing by monuments and playing in the snow.

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