SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq—Surkaw Omar and Rebien Abdullah quit their jobs and spent their life savings to migrate to Europe, only to find crowded asylum camps, hunger and freezing weather. Now back home in northern Iraq, they describe their quest for a better life as a disaster.
Many of the hundreds of thousands of people heading to Europe have no choice but to brave such hardships because they are refugees from places gripped by war, where their lives are in danger. But Omar and Abdullah come from Iraq’s northern Kurdish region, which has been largely spared from fighting with the Islamic State group.
They each spent some $8,000 on the trip, much of it on smugglers, only to get stuck in asylum-seekers’ camps in Germany and Sweden for months on end, where they say they were given very little food or money.
“It was very bad,” Omar, 25, said of the German camp. “Honestly, we were starving there. We ran away because of hunger. They gave us only cheese and tea, and our weekly allowance was 30 euros.”
