Word of the German government’s slight relaxing of its asylum policy has gotten round in the Middle East. Human traffickers smuggled fivefold more Iraqis into Germany during the first six months of this year than the same period in 2006.

Takwa Ali Zuker, 19, a physics student from Baghdad, still clearly recalls her first impressions of Germany: darkness, cold and a biting wind. The young woman, with dark rings around her eyes, was hiding in a park with her parents and two brothers — without blankets or sleeping bags to ward off the mid-September chill.

It was early morning and Ali Zuker, her brothers and her parents, both teachers, were trying to buy train tickets at the station in the western German city of Trier. But their plans to travel on to Sweden, their destination of choice, fell apart when the police asked the five foreigners for identification — and promptly detained them.

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