“Forgive me if anything happens,” was the last thing Israa Aoun (21) told her husband

Israa Aoun (21) from Syria and her brother Abdullah (19) were on the boat full of refugees that sank off the Greek coast last Wednesday.

Israa Aoun had her eyes made up before the journey, as she always did. In the last photos she sent to her husband Kassem Abo Zeed (34), she wears black eyeliner and mascara. She smiles, because she is finally on her way, to another life. For almost eleven years she has lived in the Mrajeeb Al Fhood refugee camp in Jordan, better known as the ‘Emirati-Jordanian Camp’. She had seen the endless rows of white containers in which she lived with her parents, twin sister, brothers and thousands of other Syrian refugees, in a remote desert near the city of Zarqa (an hour’s drive north of the capital Amman). She longed for a new beginning with her husband, whom she married in 2021. It was an arranged marriage. Both families are from Daraa. Kassem and Israa first had contact by telephone for seven months, after which he visited her in the camp. An imam performed the marriage. They spent a month and a half together.

This weekend Kassem Abo Zeed read the reactions people wrote on news sites and social media under the messages about the boat disaster. “‘What man would let his wife come to him by this route?’ it said. That makes me angry. And tired. People don’t know our situation.”

I want to come to you the fast way, the illegal way. I can’t wait any longer

“We can’t choose who we love,” he says, “but I loved her right away. She is kind of an angel, always kind to the people around her. Interested in the stories of her friends, a gentle person.” She walked around with a “big smile,” he says, and she was known in the camp for her cooking skills. She liked to fill her days with preparing food. She could barely read and write, because she hadn’t been to school since she fled Syria with her parents.

She was angry about that, he says, that she didn’t get the chance to learn in her life. She felt like she didn’t become who she should have become. And that without education she had no chance of a good life.

Kassem gave her hope. He himself left Syria in 2012, after serving eight months in prison. He was arrested, he says, because of a photo from the time when he was in the army, conscription. In the photo he is wearing civilian clothes, but has a weapon in his hand. “Then the government thought I was with the rebels.” He paid about $6,000, he says, to be released. He fled to Jordan, where he lived for three years. In 2015 he went by plane to Turkey and then by boat to Kos. He came to Germany via Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary and Austria. Now he works in Hamburg as a warehouse employee at DHL. With a valid passport and his life somewhat in order, Kassem Abo Zeed wanted to legally bring his wife to Germany. He has his own house, a stable income and speaks fluent German, so he met those requirements. Now only Israa had to learn German. For five months she tried to learn the strange words. Every day when they called, he spoke to her in German. He had also arranged books from the Goethe Institute for her. And she took language lessons on YouTube for hours. But after five months she failed the exam – talking was fine, but writing was not. “From that moment on she became desperate,” he says. Summer was coming, it would be stiflingly hot in the camp again. She told him: “I want to come to you the fast route, the illegal way. I can’t wait any longer.”

He had said no at first, but finally allowed it. There seemed no other option.

Kassem Abo Zeed paid a total of 10,000 euros for her trip, of which 4,500 euros for the smuggler. An older brother of Israa, who lives in Saudi Arabia, paid for their brother’s trip. It was safer if she traveled with a male relative. Israa sent a picture of them sitting next to each other on the plane to Libya. She had on her long burgundy coat and a black purse on her lap. Her hijab was the same shade of beige as the plane’s leather seats.

After a month in Libya, Kassem received a message from her at 5 a.m. that they were boarding the boat. She was scared and excited at the same time, he says. The last letters he got from her: “Forgive me if anything happens.”

Kassem Abo Zeed watches the videos of their wedding day several times a day. Israa’s dream was to build a better life with him in Germany. “Or at least a safe life, because she had never known that.”

Caroline Fish

Ahmed would do anything for his children, including a dangerous sea crossing

Ahmed Abdel Aziz Shukar (1985) from Egypt, father of three young children, has been missing since the shipwreck off the coast of Greece on 14 June.

Mahmoud Elpery (1989) posted a photo on Twitter on Friday 16 June. “This is my brother,” he wrote. Mahmoud was looking for information about his fate. Actually Ahmed was his uncle. Although he was only four years older, Ahmed was important in his upbringing. Especially when Mahmoud’s father worked in Beirut. An uncle to play soccer and gaming with, an uncle who taught him how to cook Italian – pasta and pizza. And with whom he last sat in the coffee house eight months ago, when Mahmoud returned from Dubai where he works, to laugh and talk about football and – cautiously – politics. And about leaving the country where it became increasingly difficult for Ahmed as the breadwinner to support a family.

Read also: Hundreds killed, hardly any reactions: is Europe going numb?

Ahmed grew up in Zinnarah, a village nearly a hundred kilometers north of Cairo. He worked early on in his mother’s home restaurant. After school he served in the Egyptian army for two years and then started as a cook in tourism. He soon left for Saudi Arabia to earn a little more money and came back to work in the beach resorts of Sharm-el-Sheikh and Hurghada. It was hard for him and he decided to go back to his native village, to get married there six and a half years ago.

Ahmed had two sons and a daughter (5, 3 and 1 years old), who were everything to him. His children didn’t make his worries any less. He left for Dubai, but was unable to find a job. After three months he came back, sold his wife’s jewelry and started a restaurant with friends. When that turned into a fight, he started a grocery store at home.

With the fifty dollars that this brought him in a month, and the raging inflation in Egypt that gradually made life unaffordable, the bottom of existence was in sight. Ahmed had few options but to leave again. Not to Dubai or an Egyptian seaside resort. Everyone was now talking about Europe. At least three hundred men in his vicinity had already preceded him.

Mahmoud is not exactly sure how he got the amount together – since he has lived in Dubai himself, he no longer hears everything. Some money from his friends, maybe a loan on his house. And there he went, at the end of April. A small bag with two pairs of trousers, two shirts and a jacket, in case it gets cold on the road.

Why don’t they change the rules? As long as there is no future in Egypt, people will continue to risk their lives.

He managed to get past checkpoints in Libya via the Egyptian coastal town of Salloum with a bribe and reached the Libyan port of Tobruk. Hundreds of migrants from all over the world gathered there. Ahmed joined a group of a few hundred Egyptians. He paid almost 5,500 euros. And then having to wait for another boat to leave. He had to hand in his phone. He got enough water, but only some bread and cheese. Every few days the phones were returned to send a message home. Ahmed’s wife received the last message three days before the overcrowded fishing boat left for Italy, as it turned out with about 750 men, women and children, but far fewer life jackets. Mahmoud does not know whether Ahmed had a life jacket. Well, he couldn’t swim.

“Can you write that this should not happen again?” asks Mahmoud. He would rather talk about European migration policy than about how he will miss his uncle, or how Ahmed said goodbye to his wife and children. “Why don’t they change the rules?” As long as there is no future in Egypt, people will continue to risk their lives. He thought a lot about it himself, even when Ahmed was already on his way, but Ahmed’s fate has frightened him. If his family would let him go at all.

Mahmoud has two brothers and a sister. One of his brothers has just been arrested in Libya and ransomed by his family. He wanted to go to Europe but he is on his way home now.

Lucia Admiral and Martin Kamma