It’s early morning when 30-year-old Syrian Adem Ahmed walks across a railway bridge that starts in Poland and ends in Germany.
Moments later, he and 21 fellow Syrians are detained by German federal police, after the government stepped up border checks to combat a surge in illegal migrant crossings.
“The smuggler who was supposed to drop them off in a lorry on German soil probably fled when he saw the police and left them on their own,” said federal police spokesman Jens Schobranski.
The dawn police operation witnessed by AFP took place in the border town of Forst this week, in Germany’s former communist east.
Berlin announced in early October it was increasing police checks along its borders with Poland and the Czech Republic to crack down on popular smuggling routes.
A surge in arrivals in recent months, mainly from Syria and Afghanistan, has reignited a fierce immigration debate in Germany with local authorities saying they are overwhelmed by the number of asylum seekers.
The influx has fuelled support for the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which made major gains in two regional elections this month.
The number of people coming to Ger-many “is too high at the moment”, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said recently, vowing to speed up the deportation of failed asylum seekers.
Last month alone, some 2,000 people illegally crossed into Brandenburg, one of the three German states bordering Poland.
“The only time we had a higher monthly figure in this region — 3,014 people — was in October 2021” when Belarus’ borders were wide open, said Schobranski. Since then, Poland has erected a border fence with Belarus.
Originally from the Syrian city of Idlib, Adem Ahmed lived in Turkey for the past eight years after leaving his war-torn country.
Speaking to journalists near the border, the fatigue etched on his face, Ahmed said it had been “difficult” living alone in Turkey. “I want to be reunited with my family” in Germany, he said.
Like his fellow travellers, including a child and a teenager, Ahmed said he “went without food for the last three days” of his journey. Before that, he had been eating “dates and nuts”.
Ahmed followed the so-called Balkan route to get to Germany via Poland, travelling through Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary and Slovakia.—APP
