The No.1 Refugee Aissa Taibi | Al Jazeera Correspondent - Germany
My phone rang, waking me up. It was 4am and I could barely see the caller’s number but assumed it would be the usual: the newsdesk. I had a feeling that something big was happening. It was the end of August 2015 and I was in the Austrian capital, Vienna. “Good morning, Aissa,” the caller said. I replied with a heavy voice, once described by a colleague as sounding like “the Big Bang.”
“Move to the Austrian-Hungarian border immediately,” said the news editor. “We were tipped off that the first wave of refugees heading to Germany are approaching Austria.” “Right away,” I responded. I assembled the team and within a few hours we were at the border. But the border is long and looking for the first refugees along it was like searching for a needle in a haystack.
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