The 25-year-old Syrian, a clean-cut student of electrical engineering, said he had fled the besieged city of Aleppo after his home was struck by a rocket fired in an unrelenting civil war.
With him were 11 relatives, including small children, part of a rising tide seeking passage from Syria and the tented squalor of refugee camps on its borders to the safety of Western Europe.
It had taken Bakr six months to get this far, running a gauntlet of extortion and abuse at the hands of professional people-smugglers and corrupt police.
Last year brought a fourfold increase in the number of Syrians trying to enter the Western Balkans from Greece, one leg of a route from Turkey to the prosperous West in search of asylum.
While Greece is in the EU, it is geographically cut off from the rest of the borderless Schengen zone and immigrants are increasingly unwelcome as Greeks wrestle with an unprecedented economic crisis. Illegal migrants head north to Macedonia or Bulgaria, some through Serbia, trying to reach Hungary and on through open borders to Western Europe.
In Bulgaria, on Turkey’s western border and the poorest member of the European Union, the number of Syrians seeking asylum has shot up from 85 in 2011 to 449 in 2012 and 855 in the first seven months of this year alone. Twice as many are estimated to have made the illegal crossing.
Due to lack of capacity at Bulgaria’s three refugee centres, many Syrians are sent to stricter detention centres which they are not allowed to leave, kept for months behind walls topped with razor-wire and windows with bars.
