As the Syrian civil war grinds into its fifth year, refugees are grappling with administrative headaches stemming from missing documentation. At least 4.1 million Syrians have fled the country, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and about 1.9 million are registered in Turkey. Many left without their marriage licenses, birth certificates and ID cards. But going home to retrieve paperwork is often a dangerous or impossible task.
Obaida, a 22-year-old refugee from an area of Syria controlled by Islamic State, said he tried hard to get a passport the legal way. In May, he paid his way to Istanbul from a border town in Turkey where he now lives. He spent five days waiting at the Syrian consulate. He was told to return in a year. That’s too long for the former chemistry student who needed a ‘valid’ passport to apply for a residence permit that would give him opportunities beyond those afforded to anyone who registers as a refugee with the Turkish government.
Registering as a refugee would get him a temporary ID card. But it would not allow him independence: the right to work, rent an apartment or open a bank account. He saw no other option but to seek out a growing network of document forgers who capitalise on migrants’ needs for civil documents. He says he bought his first fake passport in Syria for $1,500, but Turkish border agents would not accept it. Recently he bought his second for just $250, complete with his photo.
One document forger said he sold ‘genuine’ fake passports
A 2013 survey by the Turkish government’s emergency management agency found that fewer than 30 per cent of Syrians had entered Turkey – the common starting point for the long journey into Europe – with a valid passport.
Facebook pages geared toward refugees advertise not only passports but birth certificates, marriage licences, college diplomas, and family books, the official logs of all the members of a family. User comments attest to the documents’ quality.
Reached by phone, one documents forger in Turkey said he sold “genuine” fake passports – original, blank booklets stolen from a government office in Syria to be filled with the black market buyer’s personal information – for $1,300. University degrees, which may come in handy for a job application, sold for $1,000. Meanwhile, the Syrian government said this spring its embassies would issue passports to Syrians abroad “even if they left in an illegal manner or they hold non-official passports or travel documents,” according to the pro-government Al-Watan newspaper.
When 22-year-old Ashraf Hammoud and his girlfriend, both refugees from Aleppo, decided to go to northern Europe from Turkey with the help of a smuggler, they faced two choices for a route. They could take a boat from Turkey and walk through the Balkans, Hungary and Austria. Or they could fly, a less dangerous option that would require fake travel documents.
They decided on a combination. They first paid $1,500 each for a boat from the Turkish coast to a small Greek island called Pserimos. “After that, everything got easy,” Hammoud said.
A second smuggler in Athens mailed them two fake Portuguese national ID cards for €100 apiece. They dressed as tourists and visited a hairdresser to spruce themselves up after hiking to a Greek airport. “Really we didn’t look like refugees at all,” said Hammoud, who wears earrings and uses fluent American Millennial-speak. It worked. The pair flew to Amsterdam and claimed asylum in the airport upon arrival.