This sixty-year old mother and her five children found refuge in Khartoum two years ago or more. However, she remained haunted by the idea of travelling in search for a project or an illusion that might come true. Twenty-four refugees agreed with her to flee the destroying war in, Syria, their country. They think that continuing to travel may be fruitful or might fail but what is the alternative?
Fatma Abbas says:” We decided to travel from Sudan to Morocco and then to Mauritania towards Algeria, and on our way to the latter, we passed through northern Mali. We stepped into a rural areas, where we were had an unexpected warm welcome from families who were suffering our same ordeal and more.
Fatma goes on talking as optimism draws a ray of hope on her face and a desire of a relief she has been expecting for a long time: "We heard that Algeria was a rich and secure country that provided many job opportunities and that was why we went through a lot of trouble to reach it in order to live a better life.”
Fatma confirmed that she travelled from Syria to Morocco through Sudan thanks to the money she got from selling her house furniture in the market. Her trip from Morocco to Mauritania was provided for by a man of good will, who helped her. She then added that she travelled from Mauritania to Mali with the money she got from begging, with her five children, in the streets of the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott.
The same goes for Ahmed Salem, who is 53 and has four daughter. He says that he was not aware of the refugees in northern Mali until he met them on his way to Algeria.
He says:” My daughters, myself, and many families arrived to “In Khalil” three months ago. We did not plan to stay there, we wanted to reach Algeria but we could not since the borders were closed. What made it easy for us was the kindness of the Malians who did not hesitate to provide us with any kind of help even though we were obliged to do hard work to earn our living.”
A source from the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), which is the Malian entity in charge of managing the joint borders with Algeria, said that Syrian refugees had come to the area through Sudan or Ethiopia before reaching Nouakchott in Mauritania. From there, they moved to the city of Bassiknou on the borders with Mali known for being intensively populated by Malian refugees. This made it easy for Syrians to cross the borders to this country which is the final step to reach Algeria, their final destination in this trip.
These refugees pay Arab smugglers in “In Khalil” to help them reach the Algerian borders. The same source states that Syrians gather near a Tuareg military base not far from the Algerian borders near Bordj Badji Mokhtar.
On the other hand, it is noted that these refugees register their names with Tuareg fighters, who provide them with small quantities of food aid. The news coming from northern Mali say that Syrian refugees continue to enter the area coming from Mauritania through the village of Bar, which is located 60 km to the north of Timbuktu. “Their goal is to enter Algeria,” says an official within the Coordination of Azawad Movements (CAM), who launched a distress call to international humanitarian organizations asking to help these refugees while emphasizing on the fact that their Coordination does not have enough capabilities to relieve them.
The human rights activist and journalist Kaci Rass Elma commented about the situation and said that the Algerian State was examining the file of each of these Syrian refugees seeking asylum on an individual basis. He pointed out that no less than 200 Syrians in the Malian city of In Khalil, located 8 km away from the Algerian borders, were waiting for the approval or the denial of their asylum application. He then added:” For them, being smuggled into Algeria is more dangerous than going to Europe.”
As for the reaction of local inhabitants regarding the Syrian asylum seekers, Mohamed Ag Khamis, an inhabitant of the area of In Khalil says:” If these Syrians were really after asylum, they would go to Europe following the thousands of them who already did. I do not think they are looking for asylum here. Anyway, they are our brothers in religion, we have been suffering for many years, and no one asked about us. We are eager to welcome them so that the world will see the extent of our solidarity towards them despite our own sufferings.”
Abu Bakar Al-Ansari, a specialist in the Sahel affairs commented on the arrival of these Syrians to the region of In Khalil and said:” Northern Mali seems to be a perfect home for asylum when we see that it hosted hundreds of people who were displaced by the civil war. We keep wondering, while we are aware of the huge economic difficulties that the area is going through, about the secret behind these waves of refugees. If they had been looking for security, they would not have crossed all these countries to reach Mali, and especially its north.”
Al-Ansari continued his statement and said:” These people are looking for the areas of drug trafficking, we should not rule out the possibility that they might join Islamist organizations operating in the region.”
Al-Ansari thinks that the way Algeria treats these refugees will not be better than the way other countries treated them especially when we recall what it had done with Malian refugees when it refused to host them in early 2012 in the midst of the northern Mali crisis. Our interviewee also thinks that this area is a place of an unexpected asylum as it witnessed many conflicts between the government and the rebels and has been facing for years a fundamentally security crisis.
