Adel's Odyssey: From Syria To Nottingham

Photo: David Sillitoe

Adel’s love of English literature added a small degree of poetic depth to his plight as he and dozens of other refugees contemplated death in the Mediterranean. Adel, a Syrian, had boarded a small boat in Libya and was trying to reach Europe. The boat was designed for fifty people, but was overloaded with more than 260 other refugees. The human smugglers had left them to their fate and the suffering of those on board, including children and elderly people, was audible.

Adel himself was soaking wet and freezing at night, had no food or water with him and after 26 hours at sea, Italy was still nowhere in sight. “I was in the middle of the sea and I remembered Coleridge and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” he says today. “‘Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.’ That was me. I was in the middle of the sea and the only water was the water in the sea.” But it wasn’t English poetry that saved Adel’s life. It was the Italian Navy, which eventually found the refugees’ stricken boat, took them to Sicily and helped Adel in the odyssey which eventually brought him to Nottingham.

The 26-year-old had decided to seek a new life in Europe after civil war broke out in Syria. In this, he was no different to hundreds of thousands of other Syrians who have fled a conflict which has left the international community immobilised by indecision. According to the UN’s latest figures, some 3.9m Syrians have now fled Syria, making them the largest refugee nationality in the world. Yet Syrians make up only a small portion of the 59.5m people around the world who are now displaced by war, violence, persecution and human rights violations. Such a large movement of people is unprecedented in UN records, but the statistics, and the media coverage of events in Calais and in the Mediterranean, tends to smother the fact that this colossal turmoil is composed of individual human stories and desperate journeys of thousands of miles by air, sea and land.

Adel’s journey began at his home in the Golan Heights in southern Syria when he was studying English at university. He had a taste for classic English literature: Dryden, Pope and Shakespeare. But the war against President Assad’s regime, which began in 2011, forced him to reconsider his future. After a year, as the war spread and grew more complicated, Adel decided he had to get out of Syria. He said goodbye to his mother, father and three brothers and paid people-smugglers to drive him to Lebanon. He has not been able to speak to his family since then.

Photo: David Sillitoe

His reasons for wanting to leave Syria are not hard to understand. He was young, intelligent and had ambitions which would probably not be achieved in a country that was falling apart. He also did not want to be forced to fight for Assad – or anyone. “We have conscription in my country and if you are studying then you are exempt from military service, but after you have graduated you must join the service. You could be using arms against your brother, your father, your neighbour. I don’t want to share in this bloodshed. We are an educated family and we don’t want to kill other human beings.” In any case, having decided to leave, he says he would be regarded as a traitor if he returned to Syria in the current circumstances.

He hoped to somehow continue his studies in Lebanon, and in the year he was there he applied to study at universities in Poland and France. But he was unable to obtain visas and also began to feel insecure in Lebanon where the Syrian conflict was continued by pro- and anti-Assad factions. When friends suggested to Adel that there was a route to safety in Europe, he flew to Istanbul and then took another flight to Algiers. As Adel describes his journey, we are both looking at the pages of a large hardback atlas. Here, in tracing his journey west to North Africa from the Middle East, we have to turn several pages of the atlas to find Algeria. We have to turn many more pages before we reach Nottingham.

In Algiers, Adel paid human smugglers to take him south east through the desert to Libya. This journey, by coach and foot, took five days. “In some places we walked in the desert because there were checkpoints. So you walk one or two nights and then travel further with other people.” Finally, they reached the Libyan port of Zuwarah. He was told to embark on a small boat for Italy and it was here that he experienced moments of terror as he had to wade into the sea to reach the boat. The waves came up to his chest and he couldn’t swim. “If you don’t walk they [the people-smugglers] hit you because they want you to get on in a short time. I had to walk 100m and the water was up to my chest. I got scared. I shouted out to my friend, ‘Please help, help.’ But nobody can save another. Each one can only save his own life.”

The small boat was so overcrowded that even the small engine room was packed with people. Adel was on deck, at the front of the boat, but soon he was soaked as the waves swept over him in the swell. He also began to be sick although he had an empty stomach. “I felt like all my stomach inside was being squeezed. I was sick. I’d been five days in the desert with no food. I also started to beg for the sun because I was very cold. They told us that when you see the Italian Navy they will rescue you. All day we looked for Italy. You are looking for hope.”

The boat had set off in the cold of morning and at night it was cold again. The boat also started to take on water. “When the night came, I said to myself, ‘That is the last time I will see the sun.’ I went to the engine room. If nobody had been there the boat would have turned upside down and we started to shout at each other ‘go there.’ Three or four hours after midnight, I heard some shouting. Everyone was praying because water started to come in the boat from underneath. There were lots of kids. I thought about death. It was in the middle of the sea, in the middle of the night. Who would save my life? We started to take the water out. There were no buckets. People used their shoes, they used their hands. Then somebody on deck started to shout ‘Lights! Lights!’”

Photo: David Sillitoe

“I got up and went to look,” says Adel. “There was a light coming straight at us but it was a little bit far away. After five minutes it was closer. It was the Italian Navy.” The navy crew unloaded all the refugees – children first, then old people, then women, then young men. All were transferred to a larger vessel which took them to Sicily. “I will never forget this moment,” he says. “You are living and then there is death for one day and then you carry on. This is something you can never forget.” The journey to Sicily took 24 hours. That being the case, Adel wonders now how long it would have taken for their leaky, overcrowded boat to have reached Sicily. It probably wouldn’t have got that far. The people-smugglers had taken the money and left 265 refugees to the open sea.

The refugees were housed in an open camp in Sicily. But Adel wanted to keep moving and so he crossed to the mainland and bought a ticket for a train to Milan. We turn the pages of the atlas again. From Milan he caught a train to Paris – another atlas page – and then another train to Calais from where he hoped to smuggle himself into Britain. Why Britain? “For me, it was because I studied English, and it has the best record for human rights. They care for dignity. That is the main reason. They deal with you as a human being.”

Adel lived outdoors with other refugees and migrants for a few days (“A nice hotel. Open air, lovely trees…” he jokes) and was advised by them that he needed to get inside the port of Calais by scaling a 4m-high fence (“Not easy. I don’t recommend it.”). Once inside the port he began looking for a truck. “I found a lorry and got underneath it. It had three axles at the back and I had to sit on one of them. My friends in Calais said, ‘You need to sit on the second or third axle’ but I didn’t know what dangers there were from this situation. I sat on the last axle between the two air brakes. I only realised the danger when the driver started the engine and released the air brakes and both started to push into my sides. But you cannot say to the driver, ‘Stop, I am here, please’.”

The truck carried him into the ferry. Then he was discovered by the driver who shouted at him to get down. “He came back with lights and shouted again ‘Get down, don’t worry.’ I said ‘I’m sorry.’ I apologised to him because it was a big problem for him. He just said ‘Get away – walk away from me.’ I realised later that he could get into trouble. At the time I didn’t know whether we were still at the port or at sea. So I started looking for another lorry. This was my last hope. I wanted to live as a human being in England. So I found another lorry but it I couldn’t get underneath because it was protected on both sides so the only way to get on was between the cab and the trailer.”

It was in this way, perched in the space between cab and trailer, wriggling from side to side as the driver turned right and left, that Adel arrived in Dover in August 2014. After a short time, he jumped off the truck and began to appreciate that he had reached England. “I started walking. I looked around. Blue sky, sunny, clouds. I thought, ‘It’s England.’ I was happy.”

He was soon picked up by a polite police officer who took him to Dover’s immigration services where he claimed asylum. From Dover he was driven to London and – one more turn of the atlas pages – from there to Birmingham and finally, to Nottingham. He was later granted leave to remain for five years and now lives in Basford. Ironically, back in Syria, he had heard of Nottingham through you-know-who. “When we were kids, we watched a film of Robin Hood and there was a good song. ‘Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen…’. So when I came here I remembered Robin Hood from when I was a kid.”

While Adel doesn’t know what the future holds, he is grateful to Britain for allowing him to live here. “I want to apologise to all British people because I didn’t want to come here illegally,” he says. “But people do this because their lives are in danger. I would like to thank the British government and all British people for their hospitality and generosity – for all the help they have given to me and for helping to settle my life here.”