Kareem’s journey to Europe began like so many thousands of others: on Facebook. In the cafés of Istanbul, he sat with his friends and their smartphones, scrolling through social media sites offering guidance to those planning the perilous journey.
It was on Facebook that the engineering student first saw the now familiar route sketched out: by boat from the Turkish coast to Greece, by ferry and bus to Macedonia, and a train through Serbia to the Hungarian border, then on to Austria and Germany.
A WhatsApp message from friends warned him of the dangers in Hungary, where police have been waiting to catch those crossing the border before herding them into registration camps.
Crouched in the dawn gloom in a cornfield by the border, Kareem checked his phone again, searching for posts from others who had evaded the round-up. Indicating his rucksack and blanket, he said: “Everything else I could dump, but this is my lifeline.”
Social media and messaging services have played a key part in the upheaval in the Middle East, from helping to organise the uprising against Hosni Mubarak, who was Egypt’s dictator, to disseminating horrifying images of the effects of barrel bombing in Syria.
Now they are being pressed into service to help the desperate to flee the chaos for the promised lands of Europe. Multiple social media sites, each with tens of thousands of members or “likes”, offer the services of traffickers for every stage of the journey from Turkey.
On one Facebook group, “Trafficking to Europe”, a smuggler offers a journey to Germany by boat, bus and taxi, accompanied at every stage by an escort. The price is $6,000.
Kareem went to “Smuggle Yourself to Europe Without a Trafficker”, where others who have completed the journey have posted information. The page led him and his three friends to Marmaris, on the Turkish coast, where they paid $1,200 to be ferried in a dinghy to the small Greek island of Tilos.
