On the final leg of his journey from Iraq to Europe, Hawye Rasool Saleh paid 400 euros ( USD 457) borrowed from his best friend to a smuggler who would help him across the cease-fire line of ethnically split Cyprus.
The transaction was sealed in anonymity.
"You don't know me, I don't know you," the 32-year-old Saleh said he was told by the trafficker before he climbed into a van on the Turkish Cypriot side.
The crossing was easy, Saleh said. Two soldiers manning a Turkish Cypriot guard post checked the driver's ID, then waved the van through to the buffer zone that divides the northern part of the Mediterranean island from the internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus, a European Union member.
Saleh, who said he fled religious fundamentalism in Iraq, is one of the thousands of migrants who have slipped into Cyprus this year across its porous 180-kilometer-long (120-mile-long) buffer zone. Migrant arrivals by sea have also increased, turning tiny Cyprus into the EU's top recipient of asylum-seekers relative to its population size, as other EU countries have tightened their borders.
Government statistics show that about 5,000 people mostly from Syria but also Somalia, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Cameroon had claimed asylum in Cyprus by the end of August. That's expected to reach 8,000 by year's end, up from 3,000 in 2016. While that's a fraction of the hundreds of thousands seeking asylum in the EU, it's putting pressure on a country with just over 1 million people. "We're trying to cope, but for a long time, now, we have exceeded our fair share,"