DOLJEVAC, Serbia (AP) – Fatima Bakhshi stays close to her mother and two sons, afraid she might lose them as they trudge through the cold Balkan darkness. The smuggler they’ve paid to escort them safely into Western Europe orders them to squeeze into a car with more than a dozen other migrants.
Bakhshi, the boys in her lap, is crammed so tightly in the back that she can barely breathe. The driver swerves and she yells at him to stop. Other migrants snap at her to keep quiet and she dozes off. All she wants is a new life with relatives in Ireland, away from a brutish husband and a controlling father back in Afghanistan.
In an instant, on a road in southern Serbia, the 26-year-old’s dream turns into a nightmare. The car hits a barrier and overturns, killing Bakhshi’s mother and another person. Bakhshi’s younger son is hurt, and she is so badly wounded that her legs must be amputated above the knees.
“I wake up in the hospital, I see I didn’t have feet, there is doctors,” Bakhshi says in broken English. “Where is my mother? Where is my feet? I am calling, crying, all the time I am crying.”
Bakhshi’s tragedy highlights the dangers facing migrants – particularly women – who rely on smugglers to take them on dangerous journeys through Central and Eastern Europe in hopes of finding new lives in more prosperous countries to the west. She doesn’t remember many details of her journey and finds others too hard to talk about, including how they found the smuggler and how much they paid. The driver of the car fled and it’s not clear if he was ever found.