Refugees in a Lithuanian camp: Nouri Shani Baqi and his small family were also stuck in the country for over a year.
Photo: AFP/PETRAS MALUKAS
Nouri Shani Baqi loves Hamelin. He emphasizes this again and again during the tour. There is a lot of hustle and bustle in the city centre. The historic townscape is illuminated by the mild September sun. The streets are lined with renovated half-timbered and sandstone houses from the Renaissance period. They were largely spared the bombs of World War II and the wrecking balls of the economic miracle. And yet the small town has changed in recent years – it has become more multicultural. Numerous Yazidis from northern Iraq have also settled here in southern Lower Saxony. Just like Nouri.
Of course, he noticed the politically explosive atmosphere in Germany this autumn as well as the fear of many people about rising energy prices. But he’s not too worried himself. “Maybe it’s because I experienced wars, genocide and flight when I was young, so I appreciate life here.” The 24-year-old returned to Hamelin in the summer. Two hard years lie behind him, an odyssey that he survived together with his wife Alifa and his two and a half year old son. He was held in a refugee camp in Lithuania with his small family for over a year.
Nouri now lives in a three-storey house with a large garden with his family. In addition to Alifa and the child, his parents and his two brothers also live there, the older one also with his wife and child. A sister is still in Turkey. Together with her husband and child she is waiting for the crossing to Greece. This is how the rest of the family fled in 2014 when the Yazidi genocide was raging in northern Iraq. You can’t see what has happened to this family, who have gathered for dinner. Especially not Nouri, who experienced the flight to Germany several times in different ways.
Nouri’s father tells of how, eight years ago, the hordes of the Islamic State broke into the Yazidi regions of northern Iraq, bringing death and destruction, liquidating men if they did not convert to Islam, and degrading and abusing women as slaves. He recounts how they fled to the mountains after leaving their villages while he and the other men faced the oncoming Islamic State (IS) troops. »I saw a woman with her child who wanted to flee to us, but was then hit by an IS bullet. The child ran on, we were able to save it.«
Even the children have not repressed these experiences. The 17-year-old brother, who is currently training to be a geriatric nurse, reports: “I was only nine at the time, but I will never forget how we lived in the mountains, without food. Or later the escape via the Balkan route to Hamelin. I love Germany, I can complete my school and vocational training here without any major problems.«
The family has never experienced racism or xenophobia. Hamelin is a tolerant city, says Nouri, who is known as a singer in the Yazidi diaspora under the stage name Anwar. “So many Yazidis have found a new home here.” There are said to be around 200 families.
August 3 marked the eighth anniversary of the genocide of the Yazidis in Shingal, northern Iraq. The city commemorated the victims of the massacre on the town hall square. Many Yazidis were buried in mass graves.
Four years ago, Nouri returned to his old homeland to marry his childhood sweetheart Alifa. A delicate matter for refugees, because a return involves many dangers. But Nouri went anyway. »But the trip was unsuccessful because her parents didn’t want to let her go. So I returned to Hamelin a few weeks later, worked again as a waiter, earned money and wanted to bring my future wife to Germany one day.«
At the beginning of 2020 the time had come. Nouri flew to Iraq again, this time with the firm intention of taking Alifa with him to Germany. But this did not happen. The young woman’s relatives burned her papers, so leaving the country was out of the question. The two moved together to the next largest city, Dohuk. It was at the beginning of the corona pandemic; travel came to a standstill worldwide and in northern Iraq even more so. The young couple had a child, and Nouri’s temporary passport expired. They had a good time in Dohuk. Looking back, it was romantic for him. “A love story,” he says.
However, political and economic tensions in northern Iraq came to a head. And he saw no other choice but to entrust the fate of his small family to international gangs of smugglers. Last summer they flew to Minsk, where the Belarusian government let people from all over the world move on to the EU.
»One day we were taken to the Lithuanian border, which is the EU’s external border. It was the middle of the night when we were led towards the border. There were gunmen with masks over their faces, who spoke very good English and drove us towards Lithuania, but first took our papers and mobile phones.”
Luckily, they managed to smuggle Alifa’s smartphone into the Lithuanian detention center. This allowed them to keep in touch with the outside world. The authorities provided the arriving refugees with rudimentary care, but otherwise held back from explaining their rights to the people or even giving information about their future. For many weeks they were kept in the dark. Instead of getting to Hamelin with his wife and child to join the rest of the family, Nouri was once again stuck in a camp with his family, along with 420 other people. Nobody was allowed to leave it. He himself had already lost hope of returning to Germany. Alifa and the child had simply exchanged the Iraqi refugee camp for a Lithuanian one without having got to know anything else.
But this summer, individual refugees were allowed to leave the camp to buy groceries at a nearby kiosk. Including Alifa with the child. Nouri took the opportunity and put the smartphone that had been smuggled into the camp in her pocket after he had previously ordered a taxi near the camp. He gave her money and instructed her to take a taxi to the capital, Vilnius. He himself had previously called a Yazidi businessman who lives in Vilnius and was able to take in the family.
After Alifa and his son left, Nouri jumped over the fence of the refugee camp, because he had also called a taxi, which arrived a few minutes later. He arrived in Vilnius just a little later than his wife and son. They spent the next few days in the apartment of their acquaintance and organized the onward journey to Germany. “Eventually we were driven by car directly from Vilnius to Hamelin, across Poland and Germany, and arrived here.”
Nouri asks into the garden. “I know I’ve been really lucky – a guardian angel in my life so far.” He points to an artificial peacock standing in a border. The symbol of Melek Taus, the angel peacock, one of the seven archangels of the Yazidis. »We survived the Islamic State and the flight. Now I only hope that my sister and her family will soon arrive safely here and that I will again receive a toleration or a residence permit from the immigration authorities. My clerk there is still waiting for feedback from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. I hope everything works out.«
The office is currently examining whether Nouri will be granted a toleration, since he submitted his last asylum application in Lithuania. In the worst case, his family faces deportation to the Baltic Republic. What speaks for his whereabouts is the fact that a large part of his family already lives in Hamelin, that he himself has lived there and speaks fluent German.
During last year’s commemoration of the genocide, representatives of the Yazidis presented the Mayor of Hamelin, Claudio Griese, with a memorial in which they drew attention to the catastrophic situation in Shingal and the injustice committed against the Yazidis. The integration pilot Georg Geckler, who has also been committed to the religious community in the region for years, then demanded that the Yazidis should live in peace in Germany.
