Karzan Mohammed (21), Sulaymaniya, Kurdistan Iraq.
Karzan Mohammed (21), Sulaymaniya, Kurdistan Iraq.
Back in his hometown Sulaymaniyah in Kurdistan, Iraq, the 21-year old used to be an ambitious student longing for a career as an engineer in the gas and coal sector. In fluent English he speaks about his family, his uncle who published a series of books and about how his former teacher sometimes complained about his handwriting. In his eyes the fire of the open-minded, inquisitive and eager-to-learn student is still visible, but the life in Dunkirk, the permanent state of limbo, is demanding.
Asked about how long he has been in the Camp, Karzan struggles to find an answer, laughing he admits “Really, I forgot. You forget everything here. Everyday it’s just about making food and how you are going to do that…”. He doesn’t have contact to his family but he’s sure they are still in Sulaymaniyah.
Karzan’s powerful positive spirit makes it easy to forget the forbidding living conditions all of the camp’s inhabitants encounter. Sarwar, a friend of Karzan, quietly sits down by a small fire in front of their tents. His head bowed with a resigned stare from underneath swollen eyelids. Dunkirk’s relentless mud has been his home for two months now. Visibly tired and fatigued, exhausted and burnt out, the young man wants to hand himself over to authorities in order to be deported back to Iraq. Despite his expensive and struggling journey, he wants to leave Europe, leave Dunkirk. Two days later, upon the next encounter with Karzan, Sarwar wasn’t in the camp…
Addendum: On a later visit, Karzan told us that Sarwar apparantly made it to England.
