While wandering through the train stations in Vienna, I heard many different dialects of Arabic: Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian, Egyptian, Yemeni. I also heard Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi.
I met a tall man in his late twenties named Hamza. He confessed that he was from Algeria and told me that he’d spent half his life in prison there for selling drugs and attempted murder. He said that the wave of refugees had offered an ideal cover for people like him to slip into Europe. Hamza wore jeans and a T-shirt and smiled a lot, thrilled to have made it this far. He had a group of friends with him who didn’t look like they wanted to work as cooks or cleaners. Maybe I was being uncharitable, but to me they looked like trouble.
“We flew to Istanbul and then took a bus to Izmir,” Hamza told me. “There we destroyed our passports and just mixed with the Syrian refugees. We then took a boat from Izmir to Greece. From there to Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, and now we are in Vienna.” He said that he had seen many other North Africans arriving to join the refugees, and he introduced me to some of his Algerian friends.
Portions of several major train stations in Vienna had been converted into makeshift campsites for refugees. In these enclosed areas, the smell of sweat and food mixed with urine and feces—some of the children and others had been unable to use toilets during their long trips from Turkey and beyond and had relieved themselves in their clothes or used other methods. I saw people with skin diseases and lice. People who had a bit of money told me they’d hired cabs or buses to speed their journey, while others walked. Some had been on the road for a week or more. In addition to the cots and food stations, local volunteers who spoke Arabic were on hand to help the travelers.
While walking around the stations, I noticed that most of the refugees were men. Many told me they’d come from Damascus, though they didn’t have the lighter olive skin tones common in Syria; instead, they looked more North African, with curlier hair and darker skin and eyes. When I asked which part of the city, they walked away.
An Austrian security official told me that there were thriving black markets for Syrian passports in Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, and Austria, in addition to Turkey. But most of these people had arrived in Vienna without ever having shown a passport or document to officials, as long as they traveled in a stream of asylum seekers. Authorities along the way might have asked for names and countries of origin, but they weren’t scrutinizing documents. Opportunists could easily pass through borders simply by claiming to be Syrian, without offering any proof.
But when I heard Syrian and Iraqi dialects, I stopped to listen. There were enough pretenders that the true Syrians began to complain about the false Syrians, saying that opportunists such as Hamza would quickly wear out their welcome, if they hadn’t already.
“Look at these people, what are they doing here?” a sixty-two-year-old Syrian named Mustafa asked me. He was lean and his black hair was streaked with gray; he’d traveled to Austria with his son and a group of other Syrians and was now waiting to buy a train ticket to Germany. “We are the ones who are fleeing from war and slaughter, and now these men are taking away our space.” He had paused to help a woman who had fainted, giving a group of Afghans the opportunity to cut ahead of him in line.
Real Syrians, too, often had no documents, so it was hard to verify what they said. When I talked to a few of those carrying Syrian documents, I learned that they had been living in refugee camps in Jordan, Turkey, or Lebanon and had seized the opportunity to come to Europe, mainly for economic reasons.
People told me they believed that in Germany they would get furnished apartments, cars, money for each child, and health care, as well as the chance to open their own businesses. Some young adults asked me about the universities, and whether tuition was free.
I sympathized with their wish for a better life. Many had been through traumatic situations, and suffering was written on their faces. But some of these conversations tried my patience. When I asked, here and there, if they would agree to work for the benefits they received, I sometimes heard answers like, “I don’t want my wife or daughter to work.”
“Cleaning houses or washing dishes?” one Syrian woman said incredulously. “No, that’s not for me.” She was in her late twenties and said she had been a teacher in Syria. I thought back to my conversation with Abu Hussain, my driver in Bahrain, who’d expressed similar horror at the notion of members of his family having to take menial jobs.
I also wondered about the idea some German politicians were spreading that most of the people who were coming were highly educated and had professional backgrounds. “Educationally, they are the flower of their country,” read an article produced by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, referring to the Syrian refugees arriving in Europe. “Eighty-six percent say they have secondary school or university education.” That wasn’t what I saw in the train stations. Most of the Syrians I met were farmers or laborers. They didn’t speak any other language than Arabic and hadn’t spent much time in school. That wasn’t a problem in itself, but politicians and the media were telling a very different story, suggesting that the influx of new refugees would fill a growing gap in Germany’s aging workforce, reducing unemployment and helping to propel the economy.
I also met some migrants who said they’d lived under ISIS and liked it. My colleague William Booth and I chatted with one young man who said he had come from the so-called caliphate. “It’s good to live under Islamic law,” he told us. Bill and I traded looks. Why, then, had he chosen to leave? we asked. “Because of the job opportunities,” he said, adding that he was still in touch with people back home.
Bill and I spent hours roaming around the train stations, trying to speak to as many people as possible. In the city’s main train station, Wien Hauptbahnhof, we found a group of Iraqi men who were sitting cross-legged on a blanket near a staircase.
I knew they were Iraqi from their accents. Iraqis comprised one of the largest groups among the refugees. One of the men showed another his smartphone. “Illa tahin,” he said. “This is what we have to do with all of them.”
Illa tahin means “grind them to dust” in Arabic. It was the slogan of a Shia commander named Ayyub al-Rubaie, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Azrael. He made news in August 2015 when a video circulated on the Internet showing him slicing flesh from the burned body of an alleged ISIS fighter. “ISIS, this will be your fate, we will cut you like shwarma,” he said in the video. A number of Shia militias aligned with the Iraqi government have been accused of atrocities and serious human rights violations against Sunnis in Iraq as part of their broader war against ISIS.
The men were just about to dig into white plastic plates of rice, chicken, and salads they’d gotten from one of the aid stations. I walked up to them.