Rasheed Allawi is an anomaly. A former travel guide, Allawi fled his home in northeastern Syria in 2013, paid a trafficker $350 to cross into Turkey, then another trafficker $300 to make it close to the Bulgarian border, where he was left to walk the last five hours himself.
That journey isn’t what distinguishes him from the 4.8 million Syrians who have made similarly perilous treks through Turkey, Greece, Jordan and Lebanon. What sets the 39-year-old refugee apart is that he settled in the tiny city of Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, rather than journeying further into the European Union.
If you just looked at official asylum numbers, you might think Allawi wasn’t so different at all. As of August 2016, there were a total of 12,164 asylum applications and approximately 600 rejections so far this year. This would lead one to believe that more than 11,000 asylum applications were approved — and that those thousands of refugees are now integrating into Bulgarian society, for better or worse.