This Sunday, the second season of Hotspots begins on Sky Atlantic.

To mark the return of the show that takes you behind the news, Sky's special correspondent Alex Crawford reflects on one of the most her most daring assignments - the European migration crisis.

The heart surgeon from Damascus was the person who stood out to us.

Image: People were desperate to leave their war-torn homelands

He was a professional, educated man with a career, as well as being a father with daughters and a terrified wife who could not swim.

But, he told us, he had paid a string of smugglers to get his family out of Syria and was now embarking on a boat journey across the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece to try to find freedom and safety in Europe.


#Hotspots is back to take us behind the scenes of the world's most dangerous places...



Follow @AlexCrawfordSky and @RamsaySky into perilous border crossings where people are treated as goods and face uncertain futures.



Scroll down this #thread ⬇️for where and when to watch it pic.twitter.com/vJ17FI6jls — Sky News (@SkyNews) November 22, 2018

Cameraman Garwen McLuckie, producer Nick Ludlam and I joined the wave of refugees and migrants in the late summer of 2015, in what was the biggest mass movement of people since the Second World War.

The huge migration was largely prompted by the catastrophic war in Syria.

Huge numbers of people began traipsing across the world, heading for Europe, and as the images of tens of thousands of people on the move began to fill our newspapers, television screens and social media platforms, this seemed to spur others on to make the same perilous journey.

Image: Sky's Alex Crawford joined migrants bound for Europe for part of their treacherous trip

It was history in the making, aided and abetted by a mercenary, multi-pronged and multiple-nation smuggling network.

Our assignment was to try to find out more about what kind of people were making this long, dangerous and risky journey - why they were doing it and how it was arranged.

We found a complicated set-up of people smugglers, crime syndicates, naive idealists, business people and corrupt officials all facilitating what was a flourishing black market in illegally shifting human cargo.

Image: Dozens of people packed into a dinghy designed for just 10 or 15

We witnessed what was then a slick, sophisticated operation to move people from one country to the next.

We saw hundreds and hundreds of people waiting in the coastal Turkish town of Izmir to get across to Greece.

And a large number of them were in family groups. There were mothers, fathers, teenagers, toddlers and babies.

Image: Women, children and babies were among those who crammed into the boats

The bulk told us they were from Syria, but there were others who said they had travelled from Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was impossible to verify their stories as most did not carry documents or passports, but they spoke vividly about the war in Syria - recounting tales of bombings in their neighbourhoods and giving detailed answers about where they came from, the suburbs they lived in, and the jobs and lives they had left behind.

Because perhaps, they were in large family groups, their stories appeared genuine. Certainly their fear, terror and desperation was visceral and raw.

The dinghy we were loaded on to was designed to take 10 to 15 people and was instead crammed full of about 40 people, including the heart surgeon and his family.

The women, children and babies were all placed in the well of the rubber boat - most scared out of their wits because they could not swim. The men sat around the lip of the dinghy trying to keep it balanced during the crossing.

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In that short journey, we glimpsed the anxiety, the fear and sheer determination to get away from the bombing and terror in their homelands to embark on a fresh new start in Europe.

It gave us an incredible insight into what motivated them to travel and some of the risks they faced. And for many, this was only the beginning of their long journey across Europe to countries like Germany and Austria, which eventually gave them sanctuary.