THREAD: Today I'm releasing one of the most troubling stories I've worked on. It's about 3 young Afghans, the war in Syria & Moria's asylum lottery 1/13 newsdeeply.com/refugees/artic…
The boys' stories are the 1st personal accounts of child soldiers pressed by Iran into the war in Syria. Lied to, threatened with prison & sent to the frontline of a foreign war. 2/13
Mosa: 'I didn’t even know where we were exactly, somewhere in the mountains in a foreign country. I was scared all the time. Every time I saw a friend dying in front of my eyes I was thinking I would be next.' 3/13
Boys, some as young as 14, were drugged with Tramadol & used as shock troops in the Shia Fatemiyoun Brigade against ISIS. Their 3 stories have been corroborated by 2 more child soldiers. 4/13
The boys discovered that the promises of a residence permit & status for their families in Iran were lies. Bodies of dead Fatemiyoun were often left in Syria. 5/13
All 3 saw close friends die. Watched other terrified kids wound themselves to escape the war & eventually decided to escape while on leave in Iran, using smugglers 6/13
Reaching Greece hasn't meant finding protection. All 3 have found themselves in Moria, Europe's most notorious asylum camp. 7/13
The incomplete documents they fought for in Syria falsely show them as older than they are. This was done to hide Iran's use of child soldiers. 8/13
The Moria age assessment failed to pick up that the boys were minors & one of them has spent more than a year in the general population. 9/13
Heavily traumatized children have been left in a camp where conditions are so awful they're prompting suicides & mental breakdowns among previously healthy. 10/13
Their asylum applications show high levels of subjectivity in a system increasingly bent on refusing Afghans protection. 11/13
Serving European asylum officer admits to huge 'pressure to go faster' and sense that 'world is closing its doors' to asylum seekers. 12/13
Some of these traumatised minors, Afghans born in Iran, now face prospect of being deported from EU to Afghanistan, a country they've never been to. 13/13 newsdeeply.com/refugees/artic…
This report was only possible because of months of thoughtful work by @barbamou

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More from @daniel_howden

Apr 3, 2021
THREAD: What is controversial tech company Palantir doing in Europe? This was our starting point in a months-long investigation over a half-dozen countries, touching police, aviation, academia & health. @LHReports
@LHreports The answers have to be pieced together from fragments of heavily redacted documents, confidential sources, wary interviewees & contracts obtained by litigation or parliamentary privilege. They're not satisfyingly simple either
@LHreports It's only thanks to great journalists @e_triantafillou in GR & @maryftz in UK that we can compare findings. We met fierce resistance from EU agencies to freedom of info requests. @EUombudsman considering our appeal against @Europol
Read 9 tweets
Sep 9, 2020
THREAD: What happens next on Lesbos after the notorious Moria camp burns to the ground?

It will be rebuilt. Despite its chaotic aspect, Moria was the product of political calculations in Brussels & EUR capitals. Their calculus hasn't changed. It's fireproof
Moria was the emblem of an EU deterrence policy in which the warehousing of asylum seekers in humiliating circumstances was THE point. Any other approach is seen as creating a "pull factor". This base assumption is impervious to evidence.
When EU-Turkey deal collapsed in Feb what was strategic response? Remake same deal on marginally diff terms (hasn't worked). Now, with 12k people homeless on Lesbos & Covid already arrived, the end of Moria will mean the rebirth of Moria w/marginal changes
Read 8 tweets

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