Inside the European forest that geopolitics has turned into a graveyard

Belarus ferried thousands of migrants to the border of the European Union as a political stunt. Now they’re wandering in a cold, wet purgatory

On an October evening in 2021, a group of taxis stopped at the edge of a dense forest on the western border of Belarus. Husam, a 38-year-old barber from Syria, got out and peered nervously into the labyrinth of oaks, ashes and pines that stood between him and a new life.

He had been waiting a long time to cross into western Europe. His sisters had escaped from Syria’s civil war and settled in Germany in 2015, but Husam, a thoughtful young man from the country’s Christian minority who had once tried to join a monastic order, stayed behind to look after his elderly parents.

The family lived on the Mediterranean coast in a city deep inside government-controlled territory. Latakia wasn’t under constant bombardment like the rebel-held areas, but fighting was going on around it and Syria’s corrupt and violent security forces had free rein there. Electricity was sporadic. Petrol was almost impossible to come by, and even the most basic items were dizzyingly expensive. The only way to keep up a reasonable standard of living seemed to be by joining in with the thuggery and theft.

When Husam’s father died in 2021, his mother pleaded with him to leave. “There’s no life here,” she said. But by then it had become much harder to get into Europe. Husam was trapped.

Then a strange thing happened: a special office operating out of Damascus airport started offering Belarusian tourist visas and hotel packages in Minsk for $4,000, no questions asked. The rumour was that smugglers would help you get from Belarus into the European Union (eu). Husam decided that this was his chance. He sold his house and managed to make contact with a smuggler’s agent in Turkey, who outlined the terms of service: Husam should transfer some money to a bank account in Germany and the smugglers would provide a taxi to take him from Minsk to the very west of Belarus and maps showing how to reach the Polish border from there. It sounded straightforward – the smugglers were even supplying a taxi to pick him up once he crossed into Poland. Husam agreed and shortly afterwards boarded a plane for the first time in his life.

Everyone on the flight was there for the same reason. They divided themselves into teams, each of which chose leaders to liaise with the smugglers. Husam joined forces with a group of 13 men that included three fellow Christians from Latakia: a teenager, the boy’s father and another middle-aged man. He felt a bond with them. Perhaps it would make the crossing easier to be part of something that approximated a family unit. As the fittest member of the group, he felt responsible for their safety.

They spent a few days in Minsk waiting to hear from their smugglers. Lots of people offered to help them – for a fee – with the logistics of crossing the border. It seemed like all of Belarus was in on the plan. Husam, who realised he might have to sleep rough for several nights while making the crossing, bought a small tent, a sleeping bag, warm clothes, tinned fish, a power bank for his phone and an international sim card. On the fourth day, the smugglers’ taxi came for his group.

Their destination was a fence which marks the start of a 3km-deep militarised buffer zone between Belarus and Poland. Husam had steeled himself for a tough hike to the border, but the sight of the forest, when he reached it, overwhelmed him. Damp pervaded everything; the fetid autumn leaves swallowed up any sound. Who knew what creatures were lurking in there.

The Syrians started digging under the Belarusian fence, careful not to trigger the sensors. Eventually they excavated a tunnel big enough for them to crawl through. To Husam, accustomed to the salty, sun-warmed air of the Mediterranean coast, the earth smelled of decay.

Once they were all on the other side they regrouped and rested. Towards dawn, they began trudging towards the Polish border. Suddenly there was a fierce burst of light, so strong that each wet leaf seemed to glint like a mirror. When their eyes adjusted, the Syrians saw a line of armed border guards standing 50 metres apart.

Husam and his companions approached, hoping to explain their situation. These guards represented Europe, safety, order.

“Kurwa!” the guards shouted, a Polish obscenity. Husam didn’t know what it meant, but he could tell it was an insult. Switching to English for clarity, the guards threatened to beat the migrants, pepper-spray them, even cut off their fingers if they didn’t turn back. Bewildered, Husam turned back into the forest. He didn’t know it at the time, but it was going to become his new home.

Europe has different boundaries depending on whether you look at it from a geographical, political or cultural perspective. The border that matters for migrants today is the line demarcating the eu’s Schengen area of unrestricted movement. (Most but not all eu countries are part of the Schengen area; Ireland opted out, and Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania have not yet joined.) Although asylum-seekers are required by law to apply for refuge in the first country they reach, once they’re inside the Schengen zone they can travel to where they actually want to settle – which is often Germany – and attempt to claim asylum there.

To the east of the Schengen area is a border that is, at least on paper, far less perilous than the Mediterranean sea which runs across its southern edge. Marking the boundary between the eu and the post-Soviet states of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine is a lush belt of forest, broken by meadows, fields and villages.

The densest part of the woodland is called Bialowieza. At its heart is an ecological wonder: the last remnant of the primeval forest that once covered most of Europe. There are oaks that have been alive for five centuries and ash trees draped in fringed moss, so tall that their crowns are invisible from the forest floor. Hornbeams extend their crooked arms towards the sky and fallen deer antlers nourish mice that skitter along the forest floor.

The grand dukes of 15th-century Lithuania were the first to recognise that the area’s rich wildlife ought to be preserved – admittedly because they wanted to hunt the bison that graze there. Today it is protected by unesco. In the intervening centuries, Bialowieza’s canopies and wetlands have provided refuge for people caught up in Europe’s endless wars. Jewish partisans used it as a hideout during the Nazi occupation of Poland.

Until recently, few migrants had thought of entering the eu through the forest. Most attempted to cross the Mediterranean. In 2015, when migration through this route was at its highest, more than a million people reached the continent on rickety boats. Thousands more drowned in the attempt. The eu subsequently struck agreements with Turkey and Libya, where most of these crossings were launched, to reduce the flow of migrants, though it remains substantial.

In 2021 the government of Belarus decided to open up a new pathway for migration. Unprecedented pro-democracy protests had erupted the previous year in response to President Alexander Lukashenko rigging an election. The regime was reeling and the turmoil was spreading beyond its borders: in May 2021 the Belarusian authorities forcibly grounded a Ryanair flight with a dissident Belarusian journalist on board as it went through the country’s airspace. Police stormed the plane as it waited on the tarmac and seized the journalist and his girlfriend. EU officials slapped fresh sanctions on Belarus in response. Perhaps acting in anger, perhaps seeking tactical advantage, or maybe just attempting to move attention away from its brutal suppression of protests, the Belarusian government decided to make use of one of its most strategically important assets: its border.

In an orchestrated campaign that reached from Minsk to Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon and beyond, Belarus sold tourist visas, co-ordinated flights to Minsk from the Middle East and disseminated false information on social media about how simple crossing in the eu was. Immigrants faced no obstacles when they arrived in Minsk or ventured to the border zone, and Belarusian border guards even helped them reach the fences where Polish and Lithuanian territory began. The goal seems to have been to create a spectacle of confrontation between migrants and the Polish and Lithuanian authorities – a staged invasion at Europe’s eastern gates.

Between July and December 2021 tens of thousands of people poured through the border, most of them bound for Germany. Having made its point, Belarus stopped issuing visas for Syrians in November of that year, and Iraq shuttered its Belarusian consulates. But the precedent had been set: once a new migration route opens, it rarely closes. People discovered it was relatively easy to buy a Russian visa and then cross the more or less open border between Russia and Belarus. In 2022 Polish border guards intercepted more than 15,000 attempted crossings: less than half those stopped in 2021, but still a significant number.

Poland has not welcomed these new arrivals. International law forbids states from forcing asylum-seekers away from their borders, but in practice many do – Italy and Greece have pushed migrants back into the Mediterranean on their precarious dinghies. After the Belarus corridor opened, Polish guards drove parents, children, pregnant women and disabled people into the forest, even in the depths of winter.

Belarus itself has no desire to harbour the migrants pushed back into the forest. Instead, for the past two years, cold and frightened Algerians, Afghans, Egyptians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Pakistanis, Sudanese, Syrians, Tunisians and Yemenis have ricocheted back and forth across the nether-region that separates Belarus from democratic Europe.

Husam and his group turned around and walked for an hour back to the Belarusian fence. This time they deliberately triggered the sensors to alert the guards. They had wanted to cross without getting caught up in whatever game the Belarusian authorities were playing. Now it seemed like their only option was getting a Belarusian guard to escort them to the border.

The guards responded quickly, bundling the men into a military van and then driving them to an open-air gathering point in the forest. Hundreds of people were already there: men, women, old people and children. Some looked hopeful, others exhausted.

Once it was dark, the Belarusian guards drove them all back to the border. Husam’s stomach sank when he saw they were taking them to a stretch teeming with Polish border guards. Clearly the aim was to provoke a confrontation rather than help them. The guards encouraged the Syrians to shout and throw stones, filming the angry reactions of the Polish guards. “I realised it was just play-acting,” Husam told me.

After the Belarusian guards had the footage they needed they took the refugees back to the gathering point. Husam started talking to a Lebanese family there: the mother was heavily pregnant, and travelling with four children. Husam helped entertain her toddler while they waited for another opportunity to cross. After two days of sleeping out in the open the woman started sobbing. Husam saw that her legs were dark with blood. Her husband begged the guards for a doctor but they kicked him like a stray dog. At that moment, Husam wanted nothing more than to go home. Instead the Belarusian guards marched him to another part of the camp and then forced him towards the border again. He never discovered the fate of the Lebanese woman.

At one point the Belarusian guards seemed to make a genuine effort to help the migrants reach Poland. They loaded Husam’s group onto trucks and drove them north for half a day until they reached a different part of the forest on the edge of Lithuania.

But the smuggler’s maps were useless here. For a week the group trudged through the mud in search of a road so they could flag down a car, or a village where they could turn themselves in to the authorities. They didn’t see a soul. After a while they forgot what dryness and warmth felt like. Their clothing was perpetually damp, like the lichen on the trees. Even their bodies felt sodden. They couldn’t find wood dry enough to light a fire. After their bottled water ran out they had to drink snow-melt or water from the streams, which they attempted to filter with leaves. They began to vomit. They seemed destined to become casualties of the forest. (No one knows how many migrants have died there: 30-odd deaths were reported last year but many bodies are believed to have fallen into the swamp or been eaten by animals.)

Just when Husam’s group was about to give up hope they ran into a Kurdish family. The Kurds had a map of the area, but couldn’t get any phone signal. Husam’s group had a phone signal but no map, so they decided to join forces. Eventually they found their way back to the Belarusian border.

Here Belarusian guards took them to a makeshift detention centre where they robbed them, forced them to strip, then kicked and beat them for three hours. Husam remembers dogs being set on him. At the end of the ordeal they were cast out with their phones broken to fend for themselves.

At this point Husam’s Latakian companions decided to make their way to the airport in Minsk and get back home. None of them had expected such a terrible journey: they had imagined that they were handing over their life savings in exchange for relatively safe passage into Europe. But Husam decided to try again. “When I start something, I want to finish it,” he told me.

By now it was December and the temperature in the forest dropped below freezing. Husam was walking across a river one day when the ice suddenly gave way. He escaped the water but lost his shoes in the process, and had to walk on in nothing but wet socks for three days. His feet started to turn black with frostbite. The journey took on a dream-like quality. At one point he came across a strange, hunchbacked cow. It was, in fact, a Wisent bison, whose ancestors were once hunted by the grand dukes of Lithuania.

No longer part of a “family”, he fell in and out of different groups. At one point he was travelling with a 55-year-old Palestinian woman from Syria. He tried to behave like a dutiful son, helping her through the frozen maze of trees and carrying her luggage. One morning she didn’t wake up. The group brought her body to the Belarusian border guards, hoping they would give her a proper burial.

After this he joined up with a new group of Syrians: three men in their 20s and a fragile, quiet 16-year-old boy named Ubadah. The crew traipsed aimlessly through the snowy forest for two weeks. Their supplies dwindled. Ubadah, who suffered from epilepsy, ran out of his medication. One day he collapsed on the hard, cold ground.

Husam tried to wake him but he didn’t respond. Not long before, a fellow migrant had given his group the number of a Polish volunteer organisation and explained that if you sent them a message with a GPS pin showing your location, they could provide first aid and food. Husam dropped the pin and waited. In a Polish village 25km away, a phone pinged.

The rescue system was set up by a local collective called Grupa Granica, which was formed in the early days of the border crisis. Some of its members are professional aid workers. Others were moved to help after seeing the stories on the news, or finding freezing or sick migrants on their doorsteps.

Helping migrants is a dangerous business in today’s Poland. The ruling Law and Justice party was elected in 2015 on a platform of protecting Polish identity and values from menacing foreigners, with Islam cast as a particular threat. When Belarus launched the migrant scheme as a provocation in 2021, Law and Justice took the bait immediately.

First the Polish government declared a state of emergency at the border. The pristine forest was scarred with military infrastructure. Tourist businesses lost all their income overnight, as visitors were prohibited, and ordinary Polish people living in the area had to smuggle in their own families when they wanted to see them. Journalists and aid workers were forbidden to enter. Those who flouted the rules were detained and fined. At least nine aid workers have been charged with arranging an illegal border crossing, a crime punishable by up to eight years in prison. In August 2022 Andrzej Duda, the president, said that those who opposed what the Polish army was doing at the border were “fools and traitors”.

Two Grupa Granica volunteers set out to find Husam after he dropped the pin. When they reached him, they took Ubadah to hospital straight away. (He was later placed in a Polish orphanage, from which he escaped; his whereabouts are unknown.) Later they came back for Husam and the others and moved them to a safe house tucked in the woods just inside Poland – an act of unexpected generosity. After having been pushed back 30 times, Husam’s tribulations in the forest were finally over.

The house, a spacious modern villa with skylights and minimalist decor, belonged to Joanna, a chic, prosperous woman in early middle age who volunteered with Grupa Granica. She was delighted by her visitors. The last migrant to stay there before Husam’s arrival had been a young man so traumatised he could no longer speak. From the moment Husam and the others walked in, stinking of stale sweat, damp and campfires, she could tell the forest hadn’t broken them. They chatted and joked. After dinner they called up music on YouTube and danced. Husam in particular touched her. He told Joanna that she was his Christmas gift.

Europe didn’t turn out quite the way Husam thought it would. He did eventually manage to get to Germany, where he applied for asylum, but he was sent to a remote corner of the east of the country where no one spoke English and everyone seemed to hate refugees. He couldn’t imagine making a life there. He heard that there were better opportunities for Syrians in Britain, so he set off for Calais, where he found yet another smuggler, and made the perilous crossing of the English Channel.

Last summer Poland finished work on a 5.5-metre-high wall stretching along most of the border with Belarus. Concerns about the effect of such a massive construction project on Bialowieza’s delicate ecosystem had been brushed aside, and the new barrier was equipped with high-tech sensors.

Neither the wall nor the aggressive response of the border guards has stopped people from coming, however. When the Polish government lifted the state of emergency in the border area in July, the first tourists to return to the forest might well have found themselves coming face-to-face with migrants there.

I went to the area myself shortly after the reopening. Tourist trails swarmed with the olive-green uniforms of the Polish security forces. Signs of the migrants’ presence were everywhere: I saw an abandoned camp at the forest’s edge littered with empty packs of Minsk cigarettes and bottles of Pilgrim water, a Belarusian brand. (Such camps, I was told, are known as “railway stations”, meeting points where immigrants wait for taxis arranged by smugglers.) At my tourist lodge, the staff told me that a guest had recently opened her door in the morning to find an exhausted migrant fast asleep outside. When she brought him in, he proceeded to sleep for a week, despite her warning him that border guards could come in and arrest him any minute. It was as though he’d been placed under a spell.

I met the Grupa Granica volunteer who had been the first to see Husam’s pin on New Year’s Eve – a fiercely intelligent woman called Domenika. While we were talking someone dropped another pin. She asked if I’d like to come along. Her husband drove us to the end of a rocky dirt road and we got out and walked, loaded with backpacks of supplies. If we encountered guards we were to say we were out mushroom picking (though our backpacks would probably have undermined our story). Unaccustomed to the heavy load, I had to hurry to keep up with Domenika’s quick, sure step. Insects assailed us and spiderwebs stuck on our bodies as we walked.

Domenika halted and made a noise that sounded like a bird call. An answering whistle came from a cluster of trees. On the other side of them we found a group of young African men sitting on a hillock, looking dazed. They could almost have been students hanging out after school. Against the vivid green backdrop of the forest, they looked like they’d fallen through a rent in the space-time continuum. We distributed clean clothes, dry shoes and packets of pesto fusilli. Fat green caterpillars crept up our legs and mosquitoes engulfed us.

The young men told us that they were from Somalia and Nigeria. They had come via Russia, and been in the forest for a week. They had already been pushed back three times. One of the younger men had trench foot, which is caused by prolonged exposure to moisture and dirt. This is widespread among migrants passing through the forest. Domenika washed the boy’s feet, rubbing oil into the flaky, puffy white skin. When she picked up her camera to document the treatment he stopped her, because he had a cigarette in his mouth. “My mother doesn’t know I smoke,” he explained.

Husam is now living in one of the hotels in central London where the government places asylum-seekers. He is still waiting to, as he puts it, “be a normal person, live a normal life”. Britain is, in its own way, no less hostile to migrants than Poland. The Conservative government introduced a plan in 2022 to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda, in a bid to deter them.

I met Husam in the dim lobby of his hotel as young African men stopped by the empty buffet, looking for something to eat. There were dark rings under his eyes. Joanna had asked me to bring him some medicine for his headaches, and he took it gratefully before we started talking. Waiting for the British government to decide on his case seemed to have taken more of a toll on him than the wild forest and terrifying sea-crossing. Unable to work or study, isolated as a Christian among predominantly Muslim refugees, he spends much of his time in a nearby park watching the squirrels.

But Husam’s faith in the future is hard to dent. He dreams of becoming a music producer. Though he is nearly 40, there is something adolescent in the way he talks about his aspirations. Perhaps a degree of wilful blindness is necessary for those who set out on this journey.

After our interview, we ate together at a nearby Indian café. When I asked if he liked his curry, he told me ruefully that he only likes Syrian food. As the waiter cleared our plates, Husam showed me a letter he had just received from the Home Office. It announced that he might be deported to Rwanda.