In 2012, the Syrian civil war reached the suburbs of Damascus. Army tanks rolled over anti-government protesters in Ghouta; artillery shells fell on Darayya. One morning that May, a car bomb exploded in the town of Jdeidet Artouz, southwest of the capital. The blast jolted Ghaith, a twenty-two-year-old law student, out of bed. He lived in a two-bedroom apartment with his mother; his father had died when he was an infant, and his siblings—four sisters and a brother, all older—had left the house after getting married. Ghaith stepped to the window and pulled back the curtain. Across the street, a sedan was spewing flames. Body parts littered the road.

The victim was Ghaith’s neighbor, an Alawite man whom rebels had apparently targeted for assassination. In the weeks that followed, the government crackdown intensified. One of Ghaith’s nieces, a teen-ager, was imprisoned for posting a comment on Facebook that condemned a barrel-bomb attack by the Syrian Air Force on civilians in Homs. Government agents snatched two of Ghaith’s friends off the street and took them away. That August, the Army moved into Jdeidet Artouz and massacred dozens of people.

Ghaith studied criminal law at the University of Damascus, and hoped to become a judge. But simply commuting to class had become an ordeal. At one point, the bus he took travelled on a road that formed the boundary between regime territory and rebel territory. Rival sniper bullets frequently pinged the sides of the bus. “We ducked our heads as we drove through,” Ghaith recalls.

That fall, his brother, Ghalib, a barber with three young children, fled Syria, with the permission of his wife. Ghalib went first to Turkey, by air, then to Greece, by sea, and, eventually, to Sweden, by truck, hidden inside a wooden crate. In Gothenburg, he took a job at an auto-repair shop. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were attempting similar escapes. The wealthiest went directly to Europe, but most headed for Jordan, Lebanon, or Turkey, where they often got stuck in refugee camps. Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, did not seem particularly troubled by the exodus; after several of his advisers defected, he characterized their departure as a “self-cleaning process of the state.”

To support his mother, Ghaith had two part-time jobs: stocking shelves at a supermarket and making kebabs and falafel at a restaurant. In 2013, he married his high-school sweetheart. (At Ghaith’s request, her name has been withheld.) With these relationships and responsibilities, leaving seemed out of the question. Once he graduated, however, he would become eligible for conscription, and Ghaith—who was just over five feet tall, with a jockey’s physique—questioned his aptitude for combat. Speaking through a translator, he told me recently, “The thing that frightened me most was that I would become a victim of the civil war—or, even worse, a killer in it.”

His wife and his mother insisted that he follow his brother to Europe.

At first, Ghaith contemplated trying to secure a visa to a European country. But the rising violence in Syria had led most European countries to close their embassies in Damascus. Syrians could travel to Turkey or to Lebanon without a visa, but the European consulates there were inundated with immigration requests and issuing very few visas.

Ghaith’s other option was to apply for asylum. The European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights guarantees that no asylum seeker can be “removed, expelled, or extradited” to a country where he might face “degrading treatment or punishment.” By this logic, any Syrian who made it to Europe would be eligible to stay there. But the matter wasn’t that simple. In 1990, the E.U. had passed a law, now known as the Dublin Regulation, requiring asylum seekers to be registered, and fingerprinted, in the first E.U. state they entered. The measure, which was designed to discourage refugees from roaming Europe before choosing where to settle, posed a formidable challenge for asylum seekers, who often desired to live in one of the prosperous nations of Northern Europe, and thus had to find ways to traverse the countries in between without being noticed by the authorities. “Wherever you get stamped, you have to stay,” Ghaith told me. Some refugees, upon reaching Italy, would burn their fingertips in order to make their prints temporarily indecipherable.

In May, 2014, Ghaith got a Facebook message from his brother. “You might be able to leave in about twenty days,” Ghalib wrote from Sweden. “Don’t tell anyone until it’s all arranged. But prepare yourself so you’ll be ready if it goes through.” Ghaith replied, “Will do. May you always be there, brother.”

Ghalib instructed him to drive to the Lebanese town of Bar Elias, ten miles west of the Syrian border, where a smuggler would give Ghaith a fake passport and a plane ticket to Oslo. The night before his departure, Ghaith’s mother prepared him a farewell meal that included kabsa, an aromatic dish made from chicken and rice and tomatoes. He recalls his mother telling him, “I would rather you go than die from the pain of losing you here, like Umm Khaled”—a relative whose husband and four sons had been executed when the Army first swept into Jdeidet Artouz.

The next day, Ghaith said goodbye to his mother and his wife. He told his wife, “We won’t be apart long. I won’t change or forget you.” He was determined to give her a better life. “I do everything for her,” he told me.

Ghaith had three thousand dollars in cash, mainly in hundred-dollar bills. He hid the money in pockets that he made by cutting open the stitching on the tongues of his shoes.

“I’m tired—let’s call it tall enough.” Facebook

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His uncle drove him to Bar Elias. Ghaith met the smuggler at a restaurant, and paid him five hundred dollars for the plane ticket and the fake passport. He was to pay the remaining twenty-five hundred dollars upon reaching Sweden. Examining the passport, Ghaith was impressed by his resemblance to the nineteen-year-old Italian in the photograph. The smuggler warned him to project confidence at the airport, saying, “Any hesitation will pinpoint that there’s something wrong.”

Ghaith arrived at the international terminal in Beirut three hours early. When he presented his passport at immigration control, the officer’s actions seemed fluid and routine: he glanced at the photograph, flipped to the back, and lifted his arm to stamp the page. Suddenly, Ghaith recalls, the officer’s arm “froze in midair.” He stared at the Italian in the picture, then at Ghaith. “This passport is not yours,” he said.

Ghaith pretended not to understand Arabic, so the officer switched to English and asked for Ghaith’s Italian I.D. card. Ghaith went on feigning incomprehension. But then an Italian-speaking immigration officer showed up, and Ghaith failed to make out a word. “I couldn’t do a thing—I surrendered,” he told me. The officers discovered Ghaith’s Syrian passport in his backpack and arrested him.

He was taken to an interrogation room, where a plainclothes security official “wanted to know who gave me the passport, and I told him what I knew, but that wasn’t much,” Ghaith said. “When he saw my university I.D. card, he said, ‘Look at you. You’re studying law? You think you know what the law is? Look what you’re doing!’ ” Ghaith was slapped repeatedly across the face, then sent to jail, where he was strip-searched. “You reach a point when you become numb,” he recalls. “I was standing there naked. I felt like I was not a human anymore.”