An Afghan displaced child holds her baby sister in Kabul, Afghanistan, June 20, 2017, the World Refugee Day. (Xinhua/Rahmat Alizadah)
They left their homes in the Middle East to flee war and became refugees. Even if some of them are lucky enough to reach foreign land, they remain isolated due to language and cultural problems.
On the occasion of the 17th World Refugee Day, which falls on June 20, Xinhua correspondents visited the homeless as well as refugees in countries like Syria, Iraq, Turkey, France and Belgium, and witnessed their painful struggles for food, clean water, heath care, or simply survival.
FLEE AND SUFFER
Khadijeh Jdaiani, 40, is the female head of a five-member family that originally lived in the Eastern Couta region, east of Damascus, Syria. They fled there in 2011 when the government forces and rebels began to fight with each other.
Now they live inside a room with a floor area of less than 20 square meters in the eastern outskirts of Damascus, without any descent furniture and an old leather suitcase containing all of the family belongings.
"It was not easy to escape then under heavy gunfire," Jdaiani told Xinhua, sitting on a cotton mattress, a bed used for sleep by the entire family.
The six-year conflict in Syria has produced more than 6.3 million migrants like Jdaiani, and over 5 million of them fled to neighboring countries and became refugees.
According to the United Nations statistics, refugees from Syria have formed the largest refugee community in the world.
For those Syrians who fled to other countries, their suffering is also far from over.
"We succeeded in our second attempt," said Mahmoud Qeshreh, 27, a Syrian refugee who currently lives in the Belgian town of Lieg, when he recalled his two attempts to enter Europe by boat via the Aegean Sea.
"In the first attempt on the sea, the boat was overturned by the waves. I felt I would die at the time when the boat capsized," said the young man who came from a middle-class family in Aleppo city in northern Syrian.
At first, Qeshreh fled to Turkey, but he ran into walls everywhere in the country due to his refugee status. Therefore, he decided to turn to Greece, before reaching Macedonia, Serbia, and finally Belgium in August 2015.
The route via the Aedean Sea to Europe is the most feasible one for refugees. But the route is wrought with danger. According to Turkey's Goast Guard, in the first three months of this year, 173 illegal immigrants drowned in the Sea, while about 5,000 refugees died during their illegal migration journey towards Europe last year.
Even so, some 53,000 people took this route to reach Europe. What awaits is far from an easy life.
Some refugees in Paris told Xinhua that they cannot speak French and English, only Arabic, and they live on begging. French refugee protection agencies say the language barrier makes life hard for many refugees.
