Fleeing Terror, Finding Refuge - National Geographic Magazine. What happens when you become a war refugee? You walk. True, in order to save your life—for example, as militants assault your village—you might first speed away by whatever conveyance possible. In the family car. Or in your neighbor’s fruit truck. Aboard a stolen bus. Inside a cart pulled behind a tractor. But eventually: a border. And it is here that you must walk. Because men in uniforms will demand to see your papers. What, no papers? Did you grab your child’s hand instead, in that last frantic moment of flight? Or perhaps you packed a bag with food, with money?) It doesn’t matter. Get out of your vehicle. Stand over there. Now, papers or no papers, your life as a refugee genuinely starts: on foot, in the attitude of powerlessness. In late September near the M. They were ethnic Kurds. They were running from the bullets and knives of the Islamic State. Many came in cars, in sedans and hatchbacks, in delivery vans and pickup trucks, raising clouds of fine, white dust from some of the oldest continuously farmed fields in the world. The Turks would not allow such a motley caravan to pass. A parking lot of abandoned cars grew at the boundary. One day black- clad Islamist fighters came and got the cars, stole them from right under the noses of Turkish soldiers. The soldiers watched. They couldn’t have cared less. So it begins. You take a step. You exit one life and enter another. You walk through a cut border fence into statelessness, vulnerability, dependency, and invisibility. ![]() ![]() Watch free Movies and TV Shows online at Popcornflix. Watch full length feature films and tv series streaming online at Popcornflix. National Geographic Channel. Beyond The War On Coal. From the Ashes captures Americans across the country as they wrestle with the legacy and future of the coal. Taking Back Detroit Portraits of the Motor City by Wayne Lawrence. Hear from the die-hard natives and upbeat newcomers who are reimagining Detroit, playing out. ![]()
![]() You become a refugee.“They burned the city twice,” Atilla Engin said, standing atop Oylum H. There were many wars back then.”Engin is a Turkish archaeologist from the University of Cumhuriyet. He stared into a square pit being dug into the mound’s summit by villagers working under the direction of his graduate students. The hole was 3. 0 feet deep, and the mound was among the biggest in Turkey: 1. Its oldest evidence of occupation dated from the Neolithic, some 9,0. But above that—built, abandoned, and long since forgotten—lies the debris of at least nine human eras. Copper Age masonry. Bronze Age cuneiform tablets. Hellenistic coins. Roman and Byzantine brickwork. Many empires had seesawed back and forth across the often embattled heartland of Asia Minor. Engin was focused on a walled Bronze Age settlement, possibly a powerful city- state called Ullis, that was mentioned in ancient Hittite records and Iron Age papyri. To reach this lost city, his team had shoveled through strata that looked like cardiograms of upheaval—rumpled horizons of soil, ash, and rubble, 9,0. Things don’t change,” Engin said. He had the tired half smile of a man who thought in millennia. It is the meeting place of Africa, Asia, and Europe. It is the center of the Middle East. It is a gateway of the world.”From a ladder that he used to photograph his sprawling dig, Engin could almost see the refugee camp near Kilis, a nearby Turkish town on the Syrian border. Some 1. 4,0. 00 people who had fled Syria’s apocalyptic civil war have been stewing for two and a half years in the camp, stupefied by boredom. An additional 9. 0,0. Syrians have thronged the ramshackle town, doubling its original population and driving up the rents. Another eight million or more are internally displaced within Syria or eke out a hand- to- mouth living in such fragile way stations as Lebanon and Jordan. The war has bled into neighboring Iraq too, of course, where the zealots of the Islamic State have uprooted another two million civilians. All told, perhaps 1. Middle East. Like the refugee crisis that festered during and after the Soviet- Afghan war of the 1. Cold War contest that displaced and then utterly ignored millions of angry, hopeless people, spawning years of transnational Islamist terrorism—the political fallout in the region is unfathomable and will be lasting.“This isn’t just about Turkey or Syria anymore,” Selin . There is something historic going on here.”I had trekked to the Oylum mound in southeastern Turkey as part of the Out of Eden Walk, a seven- year journey that is retracing the first human diaspora out of Africa to our species’ land’s end at the tip of South America. Along my trail through the Middle East, I had encountered desperate men and women cast up everywhere, like flotsam, by Syria’s many- sided war. They picked tomatoes for $1. Jordan. They begged for pocket change on Turkish street corners. Some I discovered squatting under tarps on the Anatolian steppe, escapees from the wrath of nationalist mobs in the cities. Their ragged children tracked my movements with hard, appraising eyes. The Oylum mound knuckles up from the heart of the Fertile Crescent—the ancient Levantine temperate zone where modernity was born. It was here that humankind first settled down, founded cities, invented the idea of a fixed home. Yet for months I had been stumbling across a vast panorama of mass homelessness. I asked Engin what had befallen the pioneering urban dwellers at Oylum once their citadel had been breached and torched by some invader 3,8. He was unsure. He placed a palm on the frail wall of his pit. They got poorer.”And, doubtless, some regrouped. Perhaps they even conquered their conquerors. Forced migration begets empire. The United Nations calculates that by the end of 2. More than half were women and children. Among Syrian refugees in Turkey, the proportion of women and children zooms to 7. The men stay behind to fight or protect property. The women and children become destitute wanderers. Journalists rarely follow these women’s fates into urban slums, crowded camps, plastic lean- tos pegged in watermelon fields. Into brothels. Their woes are not telegenic. There are few dramatic explosions. There are no flags or front lines to be contested by the dictator Bashar al Assad, by the countless rebels. Syria’s women suffer their wars alone, in silence, in alien lands.“It is a huge hidden issue,” said Elif G. In Jordan refugee families marry off daughters as young as 1. Nobody protects you,” said Mona (not her real name), a young Syrian woman stranded in the Turkish city of . Three men tried to pull me into a car. They grabbed my arm. The people on the sidewalks did nothing. They did nothing. I want to leave this place. Can you help me? Where can I go?”In other Turkish cities teeming with refugees, anti- Syrian protests have erupted. The spark in one case was the knifing of a Turk by a Syrian neighbor. So corrosive are the sexual politics of refugees in Turkey that a false rumor attributed the killing to the Turk’s demand for sex with the Syrian’s wife in return for rent.“Four times—no, five,” a Syrian Kurdish woman named Rojin (also a pseudonym) told me, counting the number of marriage proposals she had received in Turkey over the past week. The women sat cross- legged in a barren room decorated with a dandelion in a Coke bottle. They rarely left the room. A fourth relative had not been propositioned—their senile grandmother. The old woman sat blinking, lost in dreams. She was hard to watch. She did not understand what she had lost. She had been born in Aleppo when Syria was a French mandate. Her granddaughters were hoping for asylum in France. In the charred ruins of his ancient city under the Oylum mound, Engin has discovered two bodies. Both these victims of the city’s mysterious destruction were female. We know next to nothing about them except perhaps the pathos of their social status. Their skeletons lay curled inside the kitchen of a grand mud- brick palace. Jason Ur, an archaeologist at Harvard, studies the changing settlement patterns in ancient Assyria. They happened “repeatedly over the last 3,0. Bas- relief carvings from Mesopotamia depict Iron Age armies prodding entire populations before them. In these ancient scenes the civilians are captive, harnessed. They wear chains. In this way whole communities were relocated, by violence, to work as agricultural labor for one of the world’s earliest empires. In a forthcoming paper, Ur and his colleague James Osborne suggest that settlements began to appear in eastern Syria between 9. B. C., in a “repeating pattern of evenly spaced small villages” laid out by the neo- Assyrian kings. Saddam Hussein, the “butcher of Baghdad,” did much the same thing in northern Iraq, replacing “unruly” Kurds with obedient ethnic Arab farmers. A century ago the Turks cleaned out “disloyal” Armenians, killing up to 1. Turkish neighbors. This is a story that would be familiar to the Sioux, to the Apache. Ethnic cleansing, ruthless social engineering, “homesteading”—these are not new concepts. They arose with the city- state. Inscriptions from a temple built by neo- Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled Nimrud from 8. B. C., south of present- day Mosul, Iraq: “I captured many troops alive: from time to time I cut off their arms . I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living . I hung their heads on trees around the city.”And: “I cleansed my weapons in the Great Sea and made sacrifices to the gods.”Such primitive boasting sounds contemporary, like an Islamic State video posted on You. Tube. Anatolia—the sprawling Asian peninsula of eastern Turkey. A continental crossroads. The eternal frontier of empires. A palimpsest of forced migrations. I walked its chalky roads past the broken foundations of Assyrian cities. I saw pediments of Greek columns swallowed in weedy gardens. I passed derelict Armenian churches turned to mosques. I trod on highways of stone buffed by endless processions of Roman feet. In antique Harran, an ancient center of learning under the Romans, Byzantines, and Arabs just a dozen miles from the Syrian border, thousands of Muslim scholars once experimented with physics and engineering. A minaret stood there on an empty plain—all that remains of the city that was leveled by the Mongols. And I passed the white tents of the Syrians. They were everywhere. Their doleful presence on the antique landscape seemed a sign of tectonic change, some unfathomable portent. Falkland Islands & South Georgia Tour. Set out on an epic voyage to the remote lands made famous by Ernest Shackleton. Traveling aboard the ice- class expedition ships, National Geographic Explorer and National Geographic Orion, spend six days discovering. Antarctic Peninsula. Experience. boundless wildlife and captivating beauty as you venture into some of the planet’s most unspoiled landscapes. Trip Highlights. Set out from the National Geographic Explorer or National Geographic Orion in a Zodiac or kayak to get up close to the exquisite icebergs of the Antarctic Peninsula. Trace the riveting story of Shackleton’s fateful expedition on South Georgia with our team of experts, and get immersed in a sea of black and white amid thousands of king penguins. Get hands- on instruction from a National Geographic photographer as you frame breaching whales, elephant seals, and numerous penguin species. Settle into. the Sofitel Buenos Aires before seeing the. Beaux- Arts palaces and the famous. Eva Peron. Or settle. Santiago’s Grand Hyatt Hotel before our. Andes. Day 3 — Ushuaia, Argentina. This morning’s charter flight offers some rare views of Patagonia en route to Ushuaia, the world’s southernmost city. Take a catamaran cruise through Patagonia’s scenic Beagle Channel before embarking our ship. In keeping with the nature of an expedition, our schedule is flexible, allowing us to take advantage of the unexpected—pausing to watch whales off the bow, taking an after- dinner Zodiac cruise or an extra landing during the day. Those interested may have the opportunity to kayak.(B,L,D daily)We anticipate making several landings each day in Zodiacs to explore this vast land. Depending on weather and sea conditions, we plan to make some or all of the following stops: Paradise Bay. The bay is aptly named because the surrounding mountains look as though they rise straight to heaven. Stretch your legs on a hike to a nearby summit for a breathtaking view, or slip into a kayak to quietly paddle along a cliffside rookery in search of blue- eyed shags. Lemaire Channel and Petermann Island. Cruise through the narrow Lemaire Channel between towering snow- covered mountains and spectacular blue icebergs. Step ashore at Petermann Island to the cries of thousands of gentoo penguins that stand along the coast as if awaiting your arrival. Neko Harbor. Drop anchor in beautiful Neko Harbor. Enjoy an up close encounter with the penguins on the beach or climb high onto an ice field for a panoramic vista of untouched peaks surrounding this idyllic bay. Historic Port Lockroy. The great French explorer Jean- Baptiste Charcot named Port Lockroy a century ago. In 1. 94. 4 the British government instituted the top- secret expedition code- named Operation Tabarin, creating a series of base stations in Antarctica. Base A, at Port Lockroy, was the first and now serves as a museum and Antarctica's only public post office where we can send mail to be postmarked in Antarctica. The schedule is flexible, and throughout our journey there will be opportunities for walking, hiking, kayaking, and taking Zodiac excursions. The untouched beaches, headlands, mountains, glaciers, and nesting wandering albatrosses are a great introduction to the wilds of South Georgia. Grytviken/Shackleton's Grave. Wander on foot, visiting the ruins of the abandoned whaling station of Grytviken and its fine museum about whaling and the island's natural history. A host of seabirds, penguins, and marine mammals can be seen as we hike along the coast to the cemetery where Sir Ernest Shackleton is buried. Salisbury Plain/Elsehul Bay. At the height of breeding season, the northern tip of South Georgia is said to have more wildlife per square foot than any place else on Earth. We are likely to be greeted by thousands of king penguins. Visit a colony of wandering albatrosses and see colorfully crested macaroni penguins, fur and elephant seals, and gray- headed and black- browed albatrosses on their nests. Right Whale Bay. Land on black- sand beaches, inhabited by southern fur seals, elephant seals, and king penguins, plus dozens of other bird species. St. Andrews Bay. St. Andrews Bay is teeming with wildlife. Hike past fur and elephant seals and a colony of more than 2. Gold Harbour. Gold Harbour is home to elephant seals, thousands of fur seals and tens of thousands of penguins, including a colony of aristocratic king penguins. Cooper Bay. Whalers once sought shelter in this small bay. Here we are likely to encounter king, gentoo, and macaroni penguins; prions; petrels; and terns; and perhaps Weddell seals. Stromness Bay. Stromness offers views of cliffs and glaciers that legendary captain Ernest Shackleton and his companions descended to complete their famed crossing with the Endurance in 1. Explore the glacier's ice face by Zodiac. Walk along a pebble beach, passing king and gentoo penguins, and hundreds of fur seals. Days 2. 0 & 2. Falkland Islands. Dock in Port Stanley, and stroll along the streets lined with Victorian- style houses. Hike and kayak along rocky coasts, spotting Magellanic penguins burrowing in tussock grass, herds of enormous elephant seals, and the largest albatross colony in the world. Continue on an overnight flight to the U. S. Please call for details. Expedition Team. A diverse team of experts, including naturalists, historians, and a National Geographic photographer, will accompany each expedition aboard the National Geographic Explorer. See one of the members of our extraordinary team below. Cory Richards. A climber and visual storyteller, Cory Richards was named National Geographic Adventurer of the Year in 2. Through his work in some of the planet's most remote places, he has carved a niche as a leading editorial and expedition photographer. Cory’s camera has taken him from the controlled and complex studio to the wild and remote corners of Asia, Africa, Pakistan, and the South Pacific—all in the attempt to capture not only the soul of adventure and exploration, but the beauty inherent in our modern society. Cory’s photography has appeared in National Geographic magazine, Outside, and the New York Times, and his film work has won awards at nearly every major adventure film festival, including the grand prize at the Banff Mountain Film Festival. Cory will join the following departure. Nov 2. 7 - Dec 2. SEE OTHER EXPERTS »Dates. National Geographic Orion. National Geographic Explorer. REV Indicates trip operates in reverse. Departures on the National Geographic Orion begin and end in Santiago, Chile. Please call for details. The group flight between Buenos Aires and Ushuaia (Explorer) begins at $8. Santiago and Ushuaia (Orion) begins at $8. View Ship/Deck Plan. Activity Level. Travelers should be in good health and comfortable walking or standing for extended periods of time. Daily activities may include city walking tours, visits to sites, game drives, or easy hikes, with options for more physical activities such as hiking, kayaking, snorkeling and biking. Click here for a description of all activity levels. November 0. 6 - 2. National Geographic Explorer. November 0. 7 - 3. National Geographic Orion. November 2. 7 - December 2. National Geographic Orion. January 2. 6 - February 1. National Geographic Orion. February 1. 4 - March 0. National Geographic Explorer. February 1. 5 - March 1. National Geographic Orion. November 0. 5 - 2. National Geographic Orion. November 0. 6 - 2. National Geographic Explorer. February 1. 3 - March 0. National Geographic Orion. February 1. 4 - March 0. National Geographic Explorer. He left when he was nine years old, traveling the world with his military father, but chose to settle his family in Detroit because, he says, “it’s home. There’s no place like home.” Morgan, his wife, Robin, and their children, Gary Effler and Kenneth D.
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