With US$50 in his pocket and some clothes, 17-year-old Ajmal Ahmadzai left Afghanistan in August 2021. A year later, his body was returned home to Logar province in the east of the country.
Ajmal, who drowned trying to cross the Drina River on the border between Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), is one of several tens of migrants who die in the Western Balkans every year.
While their bodies are laid in graves without names or surnames, families thousands of kilometers away wander in the dark, trying to find out what happened to their loved ones.
"When we heard that Ajmal had disappeared in the Drina, there was no one to help us. We were scared, not knowing if he was okay and where he was.
"There was no official channel that we could use for the search," says Stana Gul Ahmadzai, Ajmal's aunt, during a Skype conversation.
- Eleven-year journey of a boy from Syria to Serbia and further to Europe
- Migrants in Europe die in armed clashes and traffic accidents
- My return home - 30 years after the genocide in Rwanda
Searching day and night for any information about countries on the other side of the world, he discovered the closed Facebook group "Dead and Missing in the Balkans".
"It was a page of hope for us," he says of the place with many calls for help from families whose members disappeared, some even years ago.
There he found Nihad Suljić, an activist from Tuzla, who will help him return his brother's body to Afghanistan in the coming weeks.
"Looking for Ajmal, I realized how many migrants were buried.
"It was important to bury these people, but it was even more important to mark their graves to restore their dignity.
"In the end, they have to get a first and last name," says Suljic, standing among small monuments at a cemetery in Bijeljina, Republika Srpska, one of the two entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where thousands died and fled during ethnic conflicts in the 1990s.
Instead of the year of death and birth, the day when the body was discovered is engraved on the black marble. In the place where the first and last name should be written - a short NN is engraved.
Not far from the cemetery, in the old part of the Sveti Vračevi hospital, pathologist Vidak Simić keeps the samples taken during the autopsy of the martyred migrants.
Small parts of the femur, carefully packed in white envelopes, are the last chance to reveal the identity through DNA analysis.
"Someone is looking for that body - father, mother, brother, sister.
"Why not give those families peace, to know where their relatives are, how they died.
"In every religion, the body must acquire an identity, because before dying there was a soul in it," says the doctor.
During the search for Adžmal, Nihad Suljić met Simić, whom he describes as a "rarely kind man with good intentions".
Since then, he has been sending him photos of the missing and markings such as tattoos, which he receives from families, to compare with the bodies he autopsies.
Both know that a systemic solution for identification must be found, which they cannot do as individuals.
Recently, they are one step closer to the goal of creating a DNA database of the victims, since the International Commission on the Missing (ICMP) announced that it will take over the samples that Simić saved.
"The goal, supported by a network of activists, is to compare these samples with the DNA of families looking for loved ones," ICMP said in a written response.
Watch a video on the BBC YouTube channel about a teenager who made the journey from Syria to Europe via Serbia
Departure
After American forces withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, Ajmal Ahmadzai decided to embark on a dangerous journey to Western Europe.
"We told him: 'We live here, you should also stay, don't go anywhere'.
"However, he borrowed fifty dollars and left. He wanted a quality education, a good job, to help his family financially and thus make his mother's dreams come true. With his death, the hopes of the whole family were sunk," says Ahmadzai.
From Iran, through Turkey to Bulgaria and Serbia, relying on smugglers, with the money that his family occasionally sent him, after almost a year he found himself within reach of Bosnia.
To enter the country from Serbia, he had to swim across the Drina, a river along the border that seems deceptively tame.
"His companion told us that he once managed to cross as the leader of the group, even though he couldn't swim.
"He came back to help the others who were left on the shore. That's when the water came and took him away," he says while his face spreads into a smile of pride for his younger brother.
His eyes, however, are full of tears, which he tries to hold back throughout the conversation.
The Western Balkan route that Ajmal used is mainly the route that refugees and migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa travel to reach the countries of the European Union.
During 2022, around 192.000 migrants were registered in the countries of the Western Balkans, which is almost 60 percent more than a year earlier, they show. data from the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
The IOM report also states that most of them stayed in Serbia, from where they moved on to Hungary, Croatia or Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In order to enter Bosnia and Herzegovina from Serbia, they most often used the section between the town of Zvornik and the Šepak border crossing, along which the Drina stretches, a river that Vidak Simić knows and loves well, but describes as "insidious".
The water seems calm and seems to be wadeable in minutes.
But the bright green surface hides dangerous eddies and an unstable bottom.
"Many bodies will never be found," says Simić as he shows with his hands how river currents carry and overturn gravel and pieces of wood.
Povratak
On the last day of July 2021, the Ahmadzai family learned from one of Ajmal's companions that the 17-year-old had disappeared in the Drina.
Four days later, Stana Gul Ahmadzai posted in the group "Missing and dead in the Balkans" a photo of his brother taken during the trip, asking people who have information about him to come forward.
In a burgundy mother with an inscription Change started (The change has begun), Ajmal smiles, while the sea can be seen behind him.
At the request of Nihad Suljić, the photo was also published on local Zvornik portals.
Soon, a member of the civil defense who attended the discovery of the body of a man similar to Ajmal a few days earlier answered.
Suljić says that "the biggest struggle was to convince the institutions not to bury the body until it was confirmed that it was Ajmal."
"If the body was buried, it would make it even more difficult to return because a permit for exhumation would be required," says the 33-year-old man, who is employed in a private company where he performs administrative work.
For years, he has been helping migrants on his own initiative after eight hours of work, sharing medicines, food, and important information.
"In the beginning, I welcomed them and saw them off, and now the moment has come to talk about the identification and return of the bodies of the victims," he says.
While Nihad visited police stations and morgues in Bosnia, Stani spent time in Afghanistan.
The family feared that Ajmal's body might be buried.
There were too many things he had to do, and at every step he ran into a wall.
In Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world where 85 percent of the population lives on less than one dollar a day, there is no institution where DNA analysis of relatives, necessary for identification, could be done.
Because of this, Ajmal's brother had to travel to neighboring Pakistan, where the results were awaited for two weeks.
In addition, there is no BiH embassy in Kabul, so no one from Afghanistan could get a visa.
In the end, a relative from France arrived in the Balkans to sign the documents necessary for the transport of the body.
During a month and a half of uncertainty, the family struggled to raise the $12.000 needed to bring the body of the 17-year-old boy home with the help of friends.
"When it arrived, Ajmal's body was unrecognizable.
"I will never forget the moment when we could not show his son to his mother, who had previously become a widow. She cried so much that she lost consciousness," he says.
The photos he sent to the BBC in Serbian show a closed coffin covered with black-and-white printed photos of Ajmal.
BBC is in Serbian from now on and on YouTube, follow us HERE.
Nameless
After the first autopsy of the migrant's body, Vidak Simić could not get rid of the feeling that his work was not finished by handing over the findings and photo-documentation to the prosecutor's office.
This pathologist, whose decision is never to use the word "corpse", says that the end could only be put when the victims get an identity.
"Whatever job you do, you have to do it professionally and to the end," he says.
His duty is to remove a small sample at each autopsy that could be used for later DNA analysis.
"During the first autopsy, I decided to keep those samples. Until when - I didn't know," he admits.
So far, he has preserved 40 pieces of femur, which are packed in transparent chambers of a small freezer at the entrance to his office.
In a small windowless room, next to the morgue in the old part of the hospital, there is a desk covered with papers, a wardrobe and supplies of necessary medical supplies.
Simić has a more spacious and brighter office in the new part of the hospital, but the central place of his work is this small room, which is interrupted by the smell of death at times with the flow of air.
"The body tells us the story of what kind of life someone lived - whether they struggled or whether it was a good life," says Simić.
At one point, however, the body becomes silent.
"As the number of dead migrants increased, you start to think differently.
"They are all young people between 20 and 30 years old. You ask yourself: 'So what are you going to do in the Drina?'" he says.
The autopsy could not tell him "why these young people went to pečalba".
"Why, why, why? I gave up looking for answers, it's just the way it is," says the doctor.
He finds his own peace outside the hospital, among friends and family, about which he speaks with pride because "without roots there is no future".
Peace also brings him the knowledge that he was guided "not by laws, but by human principles within himself".
"My task as a doctor is to be a servant of the people."
Most of the missing remain unidentified
Since 66.000, more than 2014 people from the Middle East and Central Asia have died or gone missing while trying to reach their destination - some of the countries of the European Union, indicative data from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) show.
Among those whose deaths have been confirmed, only a third have been identified, states the IOM.
It died or disappeared in the Western Balkans 377 refugees since 2014.
"It is necessary to develop sustainable and efficient systems for collecting data on missing migrants and refugees not only in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Balkans, but throughout the world," states ICMP in written responses.
They add that he is through the program so far Missing migrants and refugees supported cooperation between the Mediterranean countries in order for families to find missing members.
Stana Gul Ahmadzai believes that countries must be much more understanding of the families of the missing, who are trying to find out the truth from isolated parts of the world like Afghanistan, and that obstacles such as strict rules on DNA testing must be changed.
"You can't save the whole world, but you can save one man"
Since he helped bring Ajmal's body back to Afghanistan, Nihad Suljić has received dozens of messages from families looking for their loved ones.
He keeps photos of the missing and news about drowned people found in previous years in his phone.
"I will forget everything, but I will never forget body odor, that will remain," he says.
At the beginning of June, there are no migrants in his native Tuzla and nearby Zvornik.
Nihad says that they changed the route.
Until recently, with a bigger backpack on his back, he used a bus to cross the narrow roads between Bosnian towns, ready to come to the rescue, alone or with one of the locals.
One of them is 74-year-old Emina Mehmedović, whose terrace overlooks the Drina, from where she watched the migrants passing along the river bank.
"Winter, rain, they get wet. The shoes fell apart. The clothes are squeezed on them, and they go on," says Mehmedović.
She gave them food and clothes, and gave some of them a temporary house for accommodation.
He doesn't speak English, so, he says, they communicated with their eyes.
"You can't save the whole world, but you can save one man.
"Life will pass, and neither the healthy nor the sick will be rahat (calm) if we don't help each other," he says.
In recent months, Nihad has been visiting cemeteries, dressed in a non-governmental organization vest SOS Balkanroute, which financially supported the construction of a monument to migrants whose bodies were found since 2018.
On the edge of the large Orthodox cemetery in Zvornik, on a steep hill, about twenty small black monuments are scattered.
Green grass, weeds and the occasional flower emerge from the loose soil, covering part of the inscription on the monument.
Only one has the letter Ž engraved on it.
"European values and human rights are also buried in these graves.
"Dreams and hopes, fears and aspirations are also buried there," Suljić says disappointedly.
On a hot June day, he was accompanied by Mirel Ngoso, an Austrian politician and activist, who wanted to pay her respects to the victims.
As a four-year-old, Ngoso fled the Congo with her family, due to the political persecution of her father.
"These people did not have a real passport.
"The European Union is closing its borders today, but that will not change anything. So many things are going wrong in Africa - wars, jobless youth, climate change..." he says.
She believes that "the solution cannot be closing borders, but humanity".
"Our continent is big enough for us to help."
In addition to Zvornik, the dead migrants were also buried in cemeteries in Bijeljina and Bratunac.
Next to the path that leads to the symmetrically arranged small black monuments at the cemetery in Bijeljina, trees were planted in memory of the victims.
Canopies provide shade in the hot sun, which turns the green grass into yellowish hay.
Stana Gul Ahmadzai believes that "no one leaves their homeland because they want to, but because they are forced to because of conflict, persecution, instability".
"If everything is good, why would you leave?
"States should show empathy and respect for migrants. We should help every human being."
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube i Viber. If you have a topic proposal for us, contact us at bbcnasrpskom@bbc.co.uk
Bonus video:
