33 return home from ISIS zone, recall horror

Hyderabad: Thirtythree workers from Telangana and Andhra Pradesh who were stuck in Erbil, the town overrun by the ISIS in Iraq, reached New Delhi early on Monday.

The workers were brought to India after intervention of Telangana minister K.T. Rama Rao and Union external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj.

Some of them were sent back to their native places by train on Monday. The others are being accommodated overnight at the Telangana Bhavan, and will be accommodated in trains on Tuesday.

A few workers said they knew of the ISIS risk in Iraq but seeing on neighbours who had travelled to Iraq prosper, they decided to hunt for jobs.

Speaking to The Asian Age over the phone, one of the returnees, Durgam Ravi of Mancherial, said they were stranded in an area torn by conflict and war. Each one of them learnt to live with the fear of death, he said.

“I went to Erbil two years back and had no hopes on visiting my family again. My only wish was to see my four-year-old son,” he said. Before travelling to Iraq, Mr Ravi was working as a farm labourer in Jannaram, Mancherial district.

“My neighbour, who was working in Iraq, came home and lured me with a job offer in Iraq with a salary up to Rs 40,000. I borrowed Rs 1.5 lakh from people in my village and paid him. When I reached Iraq, I found out that I was on a 15-day visit visa. My work was cleaning the premises of a college. But soon my neighbour disappeared. I was picking rags, collecting garbage and doing odd jobs. For days, there was no food,” he said.

Medi Praveen from Karimnagar said his agent had cheated him on the pretext of providing a work visa. “I got a visit visa for only three months. I did not understand it as the visa was in Arabic. In Iraq, Akama is official card for worker and we need to spend 3,000 Iraqi dinars for it. God knows how we stayed for a year,” he said.

G. Shankar from Nizamabad said a worker without Akama in Iraq could be prosecuted by the government. “I paid Rs 1.5 lakh to an agent as he promised me a job in a big company. When I reached Erbil, the agent forced me to join another company. The employer sacked me in three months and for six months, I had no work and was staying with other Indians,” he said.