Beirut, Istanbul, Budapest, Belgrade: Would-be refugees hoping to flee war in the Middle East are using Facebook as their compass for finding the people smugglers they hope will get them to a better life in Europe.
The U.S.-based website and other social media that were once used to help mobilise the "Arab Spring" uprisings now host information services for those escaping the Syrian civil war and other conflicts in the region.
There refugees can find much of what they need to know, right down to the prices, fees, bribes they will have to pay on a journey fraught with dangers ranging from drowning at sea to suffocating in a lorry.
On top of this, messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Viber help them en route to contact smugglers, friends and families alike while Internet mapping ensures they don't get lost.
In Facebook groups set up in Arabic, users post phone numbers of contacts they say can take refugees from the Turkish coast to nearby Greek islands or even further into Europe, a continent struggling to cope with the migration crisis.
For those seeking a boat ride to Greece, details on where best to cross the Serbian-Hungarian border, or the price for being smuggled all the way from Turkey to Germany, users of these groups appear to offer many of the answers.
An ad posted this week offered a late availability seat in rubber dinghy departing from the Turkish seaside city of Izmir, one of the main points of departure for Syrian refugees trying to reach Greece. The price: $1,200.
"The trip is tomorrow, 100 percent, for sure," it said.
"They'll give you a free life jacket." Another post offered places on a more comfortable "tourist yacht" at 2,500 euros ($2,800).
Facebook guides refugees before they even leave Syria, said Muhammed Salih Ali, head of the Izmir-based Association for Solidarity With Syrian Refugees.
Many are told on Facebook pages to make their way to the Izmir district of Basmane, the informal headquarters in Turkey for traffickers and those hoping to make the passage.
"They are able to make contact on Facebook with intermediaries. Once they are in Basmane, they can also spend three or five days at hotels and investigate their options. They speak with others about which smuggler is more affordable or has a reputation for safety," he said in an interview.
Despair
Social media have played a crucial role throughout the turmoil that has gripped the Arab world since 2011.
It helped activists to mobilise protests against their rulers in countries such as Egypt, Libya and Syria itself at the start of the Arab Spring, and then became a means for citizens to report on the violence that followed.
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It remains an important organising tool, and a practical aid for those travelling to and then through the European Union's 26 "Schengen area" states, which have scrapped border controls between each other, as they head north for countries such as Germany and Sweden where they hope help is at hand.
"We use our smart phones primarily, to have a GPS signal so we don't get lost," said a Syrian refugee who gave his name as Ahmad at a Budapest railway station, where he was camping last week with hundreds more refugees.
"We use social media, including WhatsApp, Viber or Facebook to communicate with people we know. If they are already in western Europe, they send information back to us to help us navigate the route," he said. "That includes contact information for smugglers sometimes, as well as things to watch out for." With Turkey hosting about 1.9 million Syrian refugees fleeing a war that shows no sign of abating, many more people are heading all the time to the EU via neighbouring Greece.
The U.N. refugee agency has registered more than 4 million Syrian refugees across the Middle East, with another 7 million driven from their homes inside the country by the war in which/san estimated 250,000 people have been killed.
Facebook users also exchange the latest news coverage from Europe on the crisis, including one story about German football fans unfurling banners welcoming refugees. Another article covered Hungary's efforts to reinforce its border with Serbia to slow the flow of humanity.
A trip all the way from Istanbul to Germany costs 6,000 euros, according to one advert on Facebook.
"Turkey, then Greece, then Macedonia, then Serbia, then Hungary, arriving at Germany. You only have to walk for one hour, and then cross the river, with the rest by car to Germany," it said.
One user uploaded a video purporting to show a group of men wearing lifejackets celebrating as they arrived in a boat on the Greek island of Lesbos. A caption with the video offered two phone numbers for future customers.
Afghani migrants push to reach for food rations at the Moria refugee camp near the town of Mytilene on the southeastern Greek island of Lesbos, Greece.
Some refugees make the entire journey from Syria using one agent. Hafez, a 31-year-old refugee from Damascus, said he had found his via social networks.
"We got information about agencies, prices, fees, bribes, phones - all logistical details," he told Reuters in an interview in Belgrade.
"We also used Google Maps extensively as people who are crossing to Hungary are sending us waypoints and coordinates.
For the moment there are two good spots on the border and one which is potentially problematic," he said, pointing to his smartphone.
"It took me three months to make a decision to leave Syria.
Mainly it was hopelessness and despair after years of war and killing that prompted me to leave."
Social media-driven
Responding to a growing international crisis, thousands of Iceland's residents have taken to social media to put pressure on their government to take in more migrants.
The island nation has already said it will take in 50 migrants, but officials said Tuesday that the country would consider raising that number.
A newly formed Facebook group, Syria is Calling, which has more than 13,000 members, is urging the government to take in 5,000.
"The idea is to show the government that there exists a will to receive even more refugees from Syria than the 50 that have already been discussed. We want to push the government - show them that we can do better, and do so immediately!" a group post said in English and Icelandic.
The group said some of its members have offered to open their houses to migrants and others have volunteered to donate money, clothes, furniture and other items, or to help the new arrivals assimilate.
The Facebook page also said: "Refugees are our future spouses, best friends, our next soul mate, the drummer in our children's band, our next colleague, Miss Iceland 2022, the carpenter who finally fixes our bathroom, the chef in the cafeteria, the fireman, the hacker and the television host. People who we'll never be able to say to: 'Your life is worth less than mine.'
'Open the gates'
The group said it would present the ideas to the country's welfare minister "to show the government that there exists a will to receive even more refugees from Syria."
One of the group's hosts, writer Bryndis Bjorgvinsdottir, said that she would pay for the flights of five Syrians, and that she knows a man who could house them.
Thousands of migrants, many of them from the Middle East and North Africa, are escaping war and strife in their homelands, with some of them taking a perilous journey across the sea in an effort to reach safe harbor in Europe.
Iceland, which has a population of 320,000, was hard hit by the financial crisis seven years ago, but there have been recent signs that its economy is improving, with tourism booming and 4.1 percent growth in the gross domestic product predicted for this year.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson said a special council of ministers would assess how many migrants could be taken in, Reuters reported.
Iceland Review quoted Eyglo Hardardottir, the social affairs minister, as saying in a televised interview that there were plans for municipalities to estimate how many refugees they would be able to accept.
Responding to concerns that an influx might strain Iceland's resources, Hardardottir said migrants have historically paid taxes and contributed to society.
"We are one of the richest nations in the world, and we can accept many more than we have been accepting in the past," she said.
The Syria is Calling Facebook page mentioned that the country's people banded together to help in 1973, when 4,000 people fled to Iceland from a volcanic eruption in the Westman Islands off Iceland's southern coast.
In the current refugee crisis, some citizens have offered rooms in their homes, or suggested housing migrants in a former army base. "It is evident that it is immoral to have it standing empty while people are dying," one Icelander, Oli Gneisti Soleyjarson wrote in a Facebook comment.
Sweden a top destination for asylum seekers in Europe
Sweden may have one of Europe's most generous immigration regimes but there is flip side - one of the poorest records among wealthy industrialised nations of integrating newcomers, especially thousands of refugees, into its labour force.
That failure to provide jobs, a cornerstone to fuller acceptance into society, has helped create an ethnic underclass, straining Sweden's open-mindedness toward foreigners and fuelling the far right - a trend mirrored across the Nordics.
"I didn't come to Sweden for the welfare. I didn't come to Sweden to ask for a hand-out," said Mahad Mohammed Musse, a 27-year-old anaesthesiologist fluent in Arabic, Somali, English and Russian, who has only found temporary work at Stockholm's tax free airport shops since arriving nearly two years ago.
"I ask only to be allowed to live my life with the education that I have," he added.
Born in Saudi Arabia to Somalian parents, Musse arrived in Sweden in January 2014 and got permanent residency two months later. Musse says he applied to 25 hospitals and health centres just to be allowed to observe Swedish doctors at work, but did not receive a single reply.
Paradise lost
A 2013 OECD study said the unemployment rate for foreign-born Swedish citizens is nearly three times more than for those native born - the second worst in the OECD after Norway. Denmark and Finland are also near the bottom of the table.
For years, thousands of refugees have headed to the Nordics, enticed by their traditional openness, strong economies, security and welfare.
Sweden gives automatic residency to Syrian refugees and welcomes more asylum seekers per capita than any other nation in Europe, making it one of the destinations of choice for many of the migrants now making their way across the continent.
Most Swedes are proud of a record that stretches back to welcoming refugees from Chile in the 70s and the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s. Today, many immigrant suburbs feature colourful playgrounds and well-tended parks, a far cry from ghettos of cities like Paris.
But there is a creeping sense that once homogenous societies held together by a strong welfare model are fracturing.
Inequality
Some 15 percent of Sweden is foreign born, similar to the United States and around double the EU average. In Sweden, inequality is growing faster than in most other developed nations.
That has helped fuel the far right, whose arguments that jobs, welfare and cherished social stability are threatened have struck a chord.
A deadly attack on a Copenhagen synagogue at an event promoting free speech and a fatal stabbing by an asylum seeker in an IKEA store in Sweden have strengthened feelings among some Scandinavians that immigrants remain outsiders.
A new mosque in Copenhagen has sparked opposition while hundreds of Finns protested recently against the opening of an asylum centre in Nokia's home town.
Anti-immigrant parties are part of governments in Finland and Norway, while in Denmark the Danish People's Party and Sweden's Sweden Democrats vie for first place in polls.
"We have islands where social problems have become concentrated and unemployment, bad school results and other social problems amplify each other," Sweden's Employment Minister Ylva Johansson said.
"That's not an issue related to how many refugees we take in. Rather it's about failures of integration." Discrimination, red tape, unions and strict labour laws that make it hard to hire cheap workers, combined with difficulties is learning native languages, have all contributed.
Swedes joke they have the best educated taxis drivers in the world. Iraqis with engineering degrees are not uncommon.
Around 81,000 sought asylum in Sweden last year - second only to Germany. That's good news for a country with a falling working-age population, as long as the newcomers can get jobs.
Language
Refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea need housing and education as well as work. Many are badly traumatised. Few speak Swedish -- a major hurdle in finding work.
New arrivals get free language lessons, but segregated housing and schools can mean levels of Swedish remain basic.
"It is very hard. I have experience but no qualifications," said Tarek Ozone, a 25-year-old from Damascus who fled to Sweden via Egypt and Libya to Sicily and then via car and train through Europe to Sweden. He was queuing inside a job centre in a Stockholm suburb, trying to find work as a carpenter.
Sweden awoke to problems of a growing underclass in 2013 when riots erupted in Stockholm's mainly immigrant suburbs, with youths burning cars and battling police blamed for the shooting of a Portugese-born man.
The heart of the riots was in Husby, a stone's throw from Sweden's IT hub of Kista. But many youths complained jobs were out of reach.
"For every 10 applications someone with a Swedish-sounding name has to send to get one job interview, a person called Mohammad Ali has to send 20,", said Moa Bursell, researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies.
It is not just about refugees. Roma migrants who have set up makeshift camps outside Stockholm, begging outside IKEA stores and metro entrances, have shocked Swedes.
The Sweden Democrats, who doubled their vote to 13 percent in the 2014 election, get around 20 percent in polls. Leader Jimmie Akesson has warned of "explosions and shootings nearly every day".
The southern cities of Malmo and Gothenburg in particular have been hit by grenade attacks and shootings in recent months, violence that stands out in a country where it is rare.
"Integration is an impossible project, particularly with levels of immigration we have now," Akesson said.
But Musse, the anaesthesiologist, still hopes to find a job in one of the country's hospitals.
"That is the only thing that keeps me getting up every morning," he said.
Serbia says it is willing to host refugees
In Zagreb, the Serbian government said is willing to receive a number of refugees permanently, Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic announced on Tuesday, a media report said.
Serbian portal Blic quoted Vucic as saying his country was more European than others, as they do not build fences, alluding to the wire fence erected by the Hungarian government on the border with Serbia.
He did not specify the exact figure of the refugees his eastern European country was willing to accommodate.
Vucic also criticised the slowness with which Europe is facing the refugee crisis without adopting a strategy to deal with this problem.
He said that although Serbia is not yet a member of the European Union it aims to become one, and they are ready to assume their share of responsibility.
Since early this year, Serbian authorities have recorded more than 90,000 people, mostly refugees that have been in and out of Serbia. Most are citizens of Syria and Afghanistan fleeing armed conflicts in their countries and seeking to obtain asylum in western EU countries.
Only 500 of them have sought asylum in Serbia, which in turn has approved only 15 percent of applicants.
