http://www.nationalreview.com/node/425580/print Thank Germany for the Influx of Fake Syrians
By Jillian Kay Melchior — October 15, 2015
Šid, Serbia — Few pause at the border between Serbia and Croatia. An observer might have thought the rush was caused by the rain, unrelenting on Sunday, turning the lush farmlands near Šid into a filthy, shoe-sucking quagmire. But rain was not the only reason to hurry. Europe’s migrants seemed propelled quickly onward by both their past and their future, the chaos they fled and the stability they yearn for.
The rush makes for short interviews. Mucking through the boggy ground, I walked briskly to keep up with some of my interlocutors, scribbling in my notebook as I moved. So I was delighted when a young man in a poncho stopped to talk with me, speaking in fragmented but passable English, his family beside him. The littlest child, dressed in a red coat, gnawed on an inflated animal balloon, and as we spoke, I nervously contemplated choking hazards.
The man introduced himself only as “Karman,” refusing to give his last name but nodding when I showed him the spelling of his first. We photographed them. I asked him where he and his family were from and why they had left. He answered immediately that he’d fled Kobani, Syria, a town on the Turkish border heavily attacked by the Islamic State last year. He told me that his father died in Kobani, along with others.
“It’s not easy living there. My friend was killed. I saw him shot in the head, pop, to the street. I saw it,” he said, adding he was scared of the war. As he spoke, the kid in the red coat bit the balloon harder, and it popped loudly. Everyone flinched. “Kobani is boom” — like the balloon, he said.
It was all a lie.
I posted the photo of “Karman” on my Instagram, along with a brief quote he’d given me. Within hours, a peshmerga friend from Iraq messaged me, telling me that “Karman” was actually Karwan Rahman, also known as Karwan Chewar. He’s a well-known TV reporter from Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan, one of the few relatively tranquil places in Iraq. He’d made up the entire story he told me.
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