Traffickers swindle migrants, sending them back to Greece

By Costas Kantouris

After a seven-month quest to escape war in Syria, Dia Kasam thought she and her two sons were finally on their way, headed by train into Serbia and from there on to Germany to reunite with her sick husband and their three other children.

Instead, tricked by Afghan traffickers, they and 90 other asylum-seekers found themselves locked in a freight car headed in the wrong direction ? back to Greece, where they started.

As the European Union struggles to hammer out ground rules to distribute asylum seekers among its member nations, refugees are left to deal with the chaotic and costly reality of fleeing war and poverty, which they?ve done in record numbers this year.

Kasam?s route to Europe is typical: She left her home near Damascus for Lebanon and flew to Turkey, where she spent seven months with her 7- and 19-year-old sons before making an illegal crossing boat crossing to the Greek island of Leros. Many thousands of other migrants take the more dangerous Mediterranean sea route from Libya to the Italian coast, and nearly 1,830 are believed to have died so far this year.

Once in Greece, Kasam made her way north, crossing into Macedonia and the border town of Gevgelija where she, her sons and the others traveling with them boarded what they thought was the train to Serbia Wednesday. But after seven hours locked inside, they realized they had travelled just 3 kilometers (2 miles) in the wrong direction, back to the tiny Greek town of Idomeni.

Most of the exhausted party spent the night in hotels in the nearby city of Thessaloniki, to let their children recover from the ordeal and figure out what to do next.

"My husband is on kidney dialysis, and who will look after our children?» said Kasam, 40. «In...