Hyderabad: The 33 workers from TS and AP 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 their neighbours who had travelled to Iraq prosper, they too decided to hunt for jobs in the troubled country.
Speaking to this newspaper 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.
Agents back home had made grand promises
“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 per month. I then borrowed Rs 1.5 lakh from people in my village and paid him for the opportunity. But when I reached Iraq, I found out that I was on a 15-day visit visa.
“My work was limited to cleaning the premises of a college and soon, my neighbour disappeared. I was picking rags, collecting garbage and doing other odd jobs. For days, there was not even food,” one of the workers Durgam Ravi said.
Before travelling to Iraq, he was working as a farm worker at Jannaram, Mancherial district. Meanwhile, 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 the details as the visa was in Arabic. In Iraq, the Akama is the official card for worker and we need to spend 3,000 Iraqi dinars for it. Only God knows how we stayed there for a year,” he said.
G. Shankar from Nizamabad said a worker without the Akama in Iraq could be prosecuted by the government.
“I paid Rs 1.5 lakh to an agent as he had promised me a job at a big company. But 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. I was arrested during inspections; they seized my passport and imposed ID 500 as penalty. I really had no hopes on coming back,” he said.
