Three women arrive on Lesbos. AP Photo/Santi Palacios. All rights reserved.“They took me and another boy, maybe 16-years-old. He thought they might kill us, he was really scared too. I called my father and he came with his friend who’s in the military, and he was telling them, ‘please, my son is here, please let him out, let him out.’ I went out, and my father told me, ‘you have to flee the country’.”
Prior to Hussein’s capture by government forces, aged 18, he had witnessed two massacres in his town of Jdeidet Artouz, just outside Damascus. He tells me about what it's like to live alongside growing militarisation, assaults from rockets, and years of mounting violence. In 2014, he fled to Lebanon and began looking for work. But the small country was already hosting at least 1.3 million Syrians, a quarter of its population. He had no luck, and shortly returned to Syria. “In time my father sold his house,” Hussein says.
With this money, he paid for his son’s passage. Hussein was two years into studying for a law degree at the University of Damascus when he left for Germany, via Turkey. “First I went from Turkey to Italy, so I was at sea for 13 days. It was a dangerous journey. Not enough food, and not enough water. The last days, we had really dirty water, but you have to drink it.”
