Across mountains and seas: Afghan refugees in Istanbul kitted out for the perilous trek to Europe

The life jackets were a giveaway. Squeezed on a rail between black sleeping bags, giant waterproof rucksacks, arctic bed rolls and storm cagoules, the two, one size fits all, psychedelic orange and bright red life vests, were tell-tale signs that this was the go-to shop for everything you might need for an English Channel crossing.

You don’t need to look far in Istanbul to find desperate Afghan and Persian youths, all of them slaving for the next leg of their European odyssey to the free world.

You’ll find them in Zeytinburnu where restaurants employ a steady stream of runaways. Afghans have already paid over the odds for passage over Iran's treacherous mountains, sometimes waist-deep in snow, and are now saving for an equally perilous journey.

"Omid knew exactly which of his products would pass muster for the journey. He favoured his proofed sleeping bags, over the flimsier non-proofed ones but could not guarantee his tents against anything more than a light drizzle. He was proud of his backpacks and rainwear, he said, but could not recommend the life jackets"

Hope Lives down an alley is the friendly face of the horrors they are likely to face as they travel onward, where the owner, Omid, kits them out for the next leg.

The shop named after its jovial proprietor hit a rocky patch during the pandemic and Omid relied on word of mouth to get the stock moving, sewn by him on heavy-duty machines in his small underground workshop.

Trade never stopped during those quarantine months, many hoping to fly under the pandemic radar and make it to England, and now barely a couple of months since he reopened, already a steady trickle of hopefuls have returned in person for his 500 lira (€30) bargain survival bundle.

You will find his place if you take a left turn outside the Sunday market, a sprawling conurbation of metal poles and awnings spanning the narrow backstreets where Afghans have set up second-hand stalls at the edges to scrape pennies together for the voyage.

Some are marooned for months, even years as they work illegally, prey to sharks and middlemen happy to make a quick buck off their precarious twilight existence.

Morsal, a 35-year-old woman whose husband was murdered by the Taliban tried to sell me her exquisitely embroidered Afghan National dress. She was saving to go to the UK with her nine-year-old daughter.

I hardly dared speak of our government's plan to capture her on arrival and ship her and her little girl off to Rwanda for processing. I half hoped she wouldn’t make it to England and steered her towards Belgium or somewhere more friendly.

Diba turns up every week with a few bits and pieces and showed me a photo of the five children she had left behind in the care of wife number two.

She sold her wedding jewellery when the Taliban came and made the desperate but ill-informed decision to go ahead hoping that one day her children could follow. She was now living on small change, terrified of falling back into the hands of Afghanistan’s new masters, but equally ill-equipped for an onward voyage.

Omid knew exactly which of his products would pass muster for the journey. He favoured his proofed sleeping bags, over the flimsier non-proofed ones but could not guarantee his tents against anything more than a light drizzle. He was proud of his backpacks and rainwear, he said, but could not recommend the life jackets.

"I hardly dared speak of our government's plan to capture her on arrival and ship her and her little girl off to Rwanda for processing. I half hoped she wouldn’t make it to England and steered her towards Belgium or somewhere more friendly"

You'd stand out for the rescue craft, he said, but anything longer than three hours in the water you would sink like a bullet. Despite advising against them, he said the Afghans were always insistent, and he did a roaring trade.

Afghans in particular are regularly rounded up for repatriation in Zeytinburnu, so frequently that Rohnuttin barely leaves his home in another of Istanbul’s many suburbs. He lost four of his housemates the other day while they were at the bazaar during a police sweep when 120 were captured and sent back to Kabul.

His situation is complicated by a secret girlfriend at home whose parents are hurrying to marry off. If he cannot find his way to England and make something of his life, their future is doomed, he fears. But he, like all the others, is trapped in low-income manual jobs and their chances of escape are bleak. “She has no idea of the situation here," he says. “She thinks I’m just being lazy and keeps telling me just to make a run for it.” “What should I do?”

My thoughts turned to Morsal and her daughter. In the unlikely event they could scrape together the €4,000 demanded by smuggling gangs, the White Cliffs of Dover are looking less appealing by the day.

I imagined them, meagre belongings squashed into one of Omid’s packs and their rain and sea-spray-drenched waterproofs barely saving them from the elements, daydreams alone keeping them going as they are buffeted by the swells.

I visualised them arriving on our shores, drenched, relieved that they hadn’t needed Omid’s dodgy life vests, weary from weeks on the road and wondering what our country had in store for them.

I hoped, a vain hope, that Rwanda would be off the table by the time they arrived, and that by some mercy Boris Johnson’s replacement Lizz Truss might keep a window open for them to squeeze through. This vulnerable little twosome whose lives had been burst apart were not demanding a lot. Just longing for peace, a new home, a new start and a welcome. Is this asking for too much?

The author is writing under a pseudonym to protect her identity