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The Guardian
13 minutes ago
- The Guardian
At 19 I had to flee my country, afraid for my life – without even saying goodbye to my family
For three days, Mohanad had been lost at sea in an overcrowded wooden boat. Travelling across the Mediterranean from Libya to Europe, he and the other passengers had run out of food and water, were running out of fuel, and had mixed their remaining sugar with sea water to see if they could drink it. 'It was madness,' he says. Weak and exhausted, passengers began drifting in and out of consciousness. Mohanad kept waking up an Ethiopian man – who was nearer the edge of the boat – worried he might fall in. At night, there were large waves, and Mohanad slept for a while himself, but was woken by a loud splash. People began screaming the Ethiopian man's name. He had slipped over the side into the water. They turned the boat around to look for him, but he had drowned. On the morning of the third day, the sea was calmer, but no land was visible. A white object appeared on the horizon. It got bigger and bigger. When the people on the boat with Mohanad saw the letters MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières) on the side, they got up to shout and cheer. 'I cried,' Mohanad says. He urged the others to calm down, and to think of the women and children on board, as their boat almost capsized in the excitement. The larger vessel was a search and rescue ship called Geo Barents, which was operated by MSF. On board, they were given nutritional supplements and water, before being taken to a migrant centre in Bari, on the coast of southern Italy. Mohanad was overwhelmed with relief, and says it was like being born again. 'I just kept remembering, I'm not going to go back to Libya.' His hope on arriving in Europe was simple: that he would start to be 'treated as a human'. Mohanad grew up in Darfur, in Sudan. His family are Zaghawa – one of the non-Arab ethnic groups in Sudan, targeted by both government forces and armed militia. 'In my country, there's a massive amount of discrimination,' he says, describing the persecution his people have faced. The Janjaweed militia, which evolved into the Rapid Support Forces, has carried out mass killings and ethnic cleansing in his region. 'They don't just murder people, it's the way they do it,' Mohanad says – describing rape, mutilation and other UN-documented atrocities. 'Wherever you go, they ask, 'What is your tribe?' That will determine what happens to you, and how you are treated.' Four of his uncles were killed by snipers in an attack on their village when he was a child. 'I witnessed a lot of horrible stuff,' he says. His family escaped on a lorry – he still remembers seeing swollen bodies by the road, and ransacked shops. From then they were often on the move, going from city to camp. He remembers a child who got sick in one of the camps where he lived. The child's mother couldn't afford to pay for basic medicine, so the child died. He also remembers visiting a large hospital, overflowing with patients, but with only one doctor to treat them all. He decided he wanted to become a doctor. Mohanad was clever; his mother had worked as a teacher before the family was displaced, and she encouraged him to attend school wherever they were. He continued to study while he worked to help support his family – selling food, drink, sometimes clothes. When he was 18, he was accepted into a medical school in a town near the camp where they lived. 'I was so excited,' he says. Those first weeks at university were the 'best of my life'. It was a big chance for him – very few people from the camp got to study at this level. But, like others on the course, he was disappointed by the poor teaching, the lack of basic services such as water or electricity, and the focus on subjects such as Arabic studies, at the expense of community medicine, which was covered in only a few days (in other parts of Sudan, the topic was taught over a whole year). 'We said, if they don't teach us properly, we can't help people, it will put lives at risk,' he says. He was threatened by the vice-chancellor, who told him to keep quiet, or he would be 'silenced', but he kept asking for improvements, sending messages to the university, and attending demonstrations with other students. He was arrested twice for taking part in protests in 2018, and, he says, treated more harshly because of his ethnicity. After being detained, 'some people disappear, no one knows what's happened to them, but they are probably dead'. He doesn't want to go into details about the prison he was held in, but says, 'the point is, you will be worried after that'. He knew, once he got out, that he had to leave immediately. He didn't dare to even say goodbye to his family. He was 19. Now the authorities had his details, he was worried he'd be caught at one of the many checkpoints and sent back to prison. 'You have to leave in secret, you have to choose an illegal route, just in order to leave the country. I would never, ever have been allowed to fly, the government would have arrested me.' Mohanad knew a truck driver, who transported sheep, okra, tomatoes and kidney beans. He hid among the vegetables and spent three days travelling from place to place via remote roads, heading north, hiding at every checkpoint, until he made it over the border into Libya. He was unprepared for what he found there. In Libya, Mohanad was kidnapped repeatedly – he lost count of how many times. 'We migrants call it hell on earth,' he says. 'They will capture people and call their family and ask for money.' The first time this happened was not long after he entered the country. He was in the middle of nowhere, in the desert. A man offered to help him, and he said yes, without hesitation – he thought he might die out there. The man took him to a farm, and locked Mohanad up, before transferring him to a place with many others. At this point, he was told he had to pay thousands of dollars to be released. He didn't have that kind of money. So they kept him, and he worked for free, for six months, barely fed, mixing concrete and carrying materials, on a series of building sites. Sometimes other people came on site, like engineers. 'They didn't know we were victims of human traders,' he says. He tried to ask them questions, to find out where they were, but had to do this out of earshot of the gang members. After six months, he escaped by asking one of the visitors for a lift to a nearby town, pretending he wanted to get some cigarettes. He had learned enough of the local dialect to get by, and after this he sometimes managed to evade capture for a few months, but it kept on happening. Sometimes he was caught travelling between cities, sometimes he escaped by bribing the police or jumping out of a car. The kidnappers often began by promising him work. 'Then when you get in their car, they start swearing at you, they show you their pistol, or their machine gun.' He was beaten hard and saw people shot in front of him. 'It's a sequence. If you get lucky you escape, or someone you know pays for you. If not, you may get killed, punished, burned with liquid plastic on your back, or they pull out your nails.' He spent three years in Libya – most of the time trying to get out. Some Sudanese people helped him for a while, offering him food and a place to stay. He applied to the United Nations to be resettled as a refugee. 'If they sent me to another safe African country, I would have gone,' he says. But he waited, and nothing happened, and then he was kidnapped again. After a while, risking the dangerous sea crossing to Europe began to seem like his only hope of escape. 'You have no choice. In Libya you will never be safe, and you can't go home – so going over the sea becomes the least dangerous option.' Mohanad had friends who had died trying to leave Libya – shot while they were trying to escape armed gangs, or drowning at sea. More than once, he was cheated by smugglers – he paid money for a place on a boat, but when he went to meet them, they tipped off another contact, and he was captured again. 'We were just victims of their business … They'd say on the phone, 'I have 70 heads' – they don't even call you people.' It took him a year to save up for that last boat trip. 'The guy, he was OK. He put us on the sea. It was a small boat but there were a lot of people, and it couldn't take us all.' After he arrived in Italy, he was taken to a huge, overcrowded migrant centre near Bari. 'They register you, and they say 'share this room', but there are only eight beds, and 16 or 17 people.' There were people who had been waiting there for months, so a group of them decided to leave – Mohanad took a bus to a border town, where a lot of people were sleeping rough. He spoke to others who hoped things might be better over the border in France. At the border, a French official asked him where he was going, and he said, 'I have no idea.' They gave him a piece of paper saying he had to leave France within three days, and one of the officials suggested going to Paris and on to Calais – he understood that there would be food and help there. At that point, he didn't even know that Calais was on the coast. By then, Mohanad was in a group of seven or eight people, from Sudan, Syria and Chad. They moved through France, sleeping on the streets, travelling on trains without a ticket, until the guard or the police threw them off. Between trains, they wandered around all night, freezing cold, in the rain, searching for shelter. They had a few biscuits from Bari, which soon ran out. In Dijon, the rain fell all night, but they met a kind Nigerian, who gave them food in his own home. 'If I had a chance, I would thank him now, it was an amazing thing that he did for us.' 'We had no idea about claiming to be a refugee or an asylum seeker. No one advised us,' Mohanad says. Other migrants directed them to Calais, where there were charities providing food, but he was sleeping rough – locals threw glass bottles at him and he says he experienced a lot of racism. He discovered that many people there were trying to cross the Channel. 'I just wanted a warm place, a safe place,' he says. French police confiscated any tents they had. Mohanad tried to help some younger Sudanese teenagers, but one of them was killed boarding a truck, and another was badly wounded in an attack. In September 2021, Mohanad crossed to the UK, hidden in a vehicle. He climbed inside, in the early morning – he couldn't see out, but knew when they started driving again that they'd reached England. They stopped in the late afternoon, when the driver began to unload his boxes at a factory near Birmingham. Mohanad jumped out and ran away, because he was worried the driver would be angry. 'The driver was very surprised.' It was a sunny day, and everything looked different – he noticed that people seemed friendlier than in France. He asked a couple of passersby for help, until a woman pushing a buggy showed him the way to the nearest police station. 'I said to them 'Hello, is this a police station?'' he says. 'They said, 'Are you alright? What's the problem, where did you come from?' I said I come from Sudan. I came by lorry.' The absurdity of it makes him smile. 'They were surprised. How did you come from Sudan, and end up in Birmingham?' He says the police were kind and offered him food. At first, he knew nothing about the system here, but after a month, when he was told about the option to claim asylum, Mohanad did so. He spent 15 months in asylum accommodation in Yorkshire, first in hotels and then in a shared house, waiting for a decision. At first, just having somewhere safe to stay and a bed to sleep in was a huge relief, but the uncertainty and not being able to work was unsettling. 'You have nothing to do,' he says. He had flashbacks, and was diagnosed with PTSD. Things improved when he started volunteering with the Refugee Council on a healthcare project, where he was trained to give advice and support to other refugees. This gave him a chance to speak to people, a bit of experience in how the NHS works, and also a sense of purpose. He says he's experienced less racism in the UK than in France or elsewhere. But he never felt fully part of the community until he was granted asylum, and was accepted as a refugee. 'When I got my papers, it was the same feeling as being rescued at sea. I thought, 'Yes, I can live.'' Mohanad found a room, and last year, thanks partly to his experience with the Refugee Council, he enrolled on an access to medicine course. He passed the science elements with a distinction, but struggled to reach the required level in English. For now, he's looking for work as a security guard or in a warehouse, but he still hopes to keep studying medicine, and has also applied to volunteer at a local hospital. Since he left Sudan, the war has spread, and he is worried about his family. 'I know war, it's not something new to me. But to see the whole of Sudan in that pain, you can't describe it. The same militia are killing and murdering and raping people. They took control of my whole region, except for one city. To see the same thing, ethnic killings, genocide …' He says he'd like the world to pay more attention to Sudan. Sudanese refugees who do make it to safety here, against the odds, face hostile policies. 'Now there's a plan to refuse citizenship to refugees,' Mohanad says. 'If I spend my whole life here, I will remain a refugee, a second class or even third class citizen. It feels as if they can just deport me. I started worrying again,' he says. 'They say we have to come here legally – so why don't you provide safe routes?' He says it would be better if there were a realistic way to apply for refugee status before travelling to the UK. There are no schemes to help people from Sudan, he points out, and getting an aeroplane, let alone securing a visa, is impossible for most. He didn't set out to come to the UK, he says – he wanted to stay in Sudan and become a doctor – but that wasn't possible, and he left to save his life. Making this journey is how he survived.
Metro
15 minutes ago
- Metro
Jose Mourinho explains how his management style changed football
Jose Mourinho feels his way of working changed football and there is a clear distinction between before and after his emergence. The iconic boss first came to the world's attention when he won the Champions League with Porto in 2004, earning a move to the Premier League with Chelsea. In his first of two spells with the Blues he won the Premier League twice, before leaving for Inter Milan where he won two Serie A titles and the Champions League in 2010. A move to Real Madrid followed where he won La Liga in 2012 while competing against one of the great Barcelona sides. Since then he returned to Chelsea, moved to Manchester United, Tottenham, Roma and now Fenerbahce. Metro's new weekly football newsletter: In The Mixer. Exclusive analysis, FPL tips and transfer talk sent straight to your inbox every Friday – sign up, it's an open goal. His reputation may have dimmed in recent years, but at the peak of his powers in the noughties he was a pioneering manager, considered one of the best in the world. The 62-year-old feels he was so pioneering that football management is different now to before he arrived at the top of the sport. 'It is complicated. Methodologically, I think there is a distinction between before me and after me,' Mourinho said, via Turkish site Fanatik. 'Methodologically, in terms of how you train, how you think about the game, in the early 2000s, until 2000 and 2004 when I won my first Champions League, there was a big explosion of interest in the way I worked and then there is clearly an after. 'I remember, for example, when I came to Italy to Inter, when I first went to Italy, even the players didn't really believe in that way of working. There was a radical change on a methodological level.' Mourinho's first season at Fenerbahce did not produce any silverware, but he rages against the idea that he is past his best. 'Many people say something that makes me laugh, 'Jose Mourinho is not what he used to be, he has lost his identity',' he said. 'It is better to lose identity and win. I think those who say that win less. So, those who win, who win more often, are the ones who are more impressive. Then there's something that makes me feel even better, and that's the way I win, where I win. Porto Primeira Liga: 2002/03, 2003/04 Taca de Portugal: 2002–03 Champions League: 2003–04 UEFA Cup: 2002–03 Chelsea Premier League: 2004–05, 2005–06, 2014–1 FA Cup: 2006–07 Inter Serie A: 2008–09, 2009–10 Coppa Italia: 2009–10 Champions League: 2009–10 Real Madrid La Liga: 2011–12 Copa del Rey: 2010–11 Man Utd Europa League: 2016–17 'Because winning the Champions League with Porto is not the same as winning the Champions League with Barcelona. Winning the Champions League with Inter is not the same as winning the Champions League with Real Madrid. More Trending 'You can say: 'OK, but you were at Real Madrid and you didn't win the Champions League.' I didn't win the Champions League, but I won the league title and the cup, I beat Barcelona, the best team in the world, and I broke a big cycle of Barcelona's dominance against Real Madrid. 'The last UEFA title I won with Roma, Roma's first and only European title, so the things I did, not only the number of titles I won, but the way I did them… I'm one of the best.' Mourinho will try and return to the Champions League with his Fenerbahce side when they take on Benfica in the play-offs, starting in Turkey on Wednesday night. MORE: Rangers vs Club Brugge TV channel, live stream, team news and odds MORE: When is the Champions League draw and when does the group stage start? MORE: Jamie Carragher makes shocking Chelsea prediction as fans call him a 'clown'
Wales Online
15 minutes ago
- Wales Online
Ryan Reynolds and Tom Brady in fight for budding Liverpool ace as Wrexham eye 11th signing
Ryan Reynolds and Tom Brady in fight for budding Liverpool ace as Wrexham eye 11th signing Wrexham and Birmingham are battling it out with several other teams for Liverpool forward Lewis Koumas, who is set to leave the Premier League club before transfer deadline day Ryan Reynolds' Wrexham are facing a tough battle with Birmingham for Liverpool's Lewis Koumas (Image: PA Wire/PA Images) Wrexham and Birmingham City are gearing up for a transfer battle over Liverpool youngster Lewis Koumas. The two Championship rivals are at the forefront of a lengthy list of potential suitors for the Welsh international. The 19-year-old forward has become hot property following a successful stint in the second tier last season while on loan at Stoke City. Sheffield United have maintained a keen interest in the player throughout the year, with Norwich City, Preston North End and Hull City also monitoring the situation closely. However, it's Wrexham, owned by Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney and Birmingham, where NFL icon Tom Brady holds a minority stake, that are leading the pursuit for Koumas. Both clubs are believed to be prepared to offer a permanent deal to him after he scored on his senior Liverpool debut in an FA Cup victory over Southampton in February last year. Koumas, who was on the bench for the Reds' League Cup final triumph over Chelsea in 2023/24, has made 50 senior appearances and has also earned six full Wales caps. The reigning Premier League champions view the forward as being further along in his development than a player like Bobby Clark was when he left Anfield for RB Salzburg in a £10million deal last year. With 16-year-old Rio Ngumoha having risen from the club's academy in the past nine months, first-team opportunities for Koumas were limited during pre-season to a second-half appearance at Preston and a brief cameo in the opening friendly against Athletic Bilbao. Article continues below Liverpool forward Lewis Koumas is being chased by Wrexham and Birmingham (Image: Robbie Jay Barratt - AMA/Getty Images) Koumas is anticipated to depart before the transfer deadline on September 1 and was notably absent as Liverpool's under-21s' lost at Leicester City in the Premier League 2 on Monday. If he does make the move to Wrexham, he would likely become the club's eleventh summer signing. The Red Dragons have so far brought in nine new faces after securing promotion from League One in April, including Wales trio Danny Ward, Kieffer Moore and Nathan Broadhead. Man City youngster Callum Doyle is expected to become the tenth after a deal worth up to £8m was agreed between the two clubs. With Wrexham losing their opening two Championship games against Southampton and West Brom, manager Phil Parkinson is keen to add more recruits following a busy summer. Speaking after their latest defeat to the Baggies last weekend, the former Bolton and Sunderland boss said a few areas of his squad still needed strengthening. Watch Welcome to Wrexham season 4 on Disney+ This article contains affiliate links, we will receive a commission on any sales we generate from it. Learn more from £4.99 Disney+ Get Disney+ here Product Description Welcome to Wrexham is back on Disney+ for a fourth season. Fans can watch the series with a £4.99 monthly plan, or get 12 months for the price of 10 by paying for a year upfront. "The lads we've brought in at the moment are really good and I'm pleased with the way they've settled in," he said. "We probably do need a couple more players and we're looking at that. "It's ongoing, it's obviously busy for all managers and clubs at the moment when you're preparing for games and looking to improve the squad." Parkinson was dealt a blow earlier this week following the news that summer signing Josh Windass will be out of action for up to six weeks. The attacking midfielder has impressed during Wrexham's opening games, scoring from the penalty spot in the defeat to Southampton, but came off with a hamstring injury against West Brom last Saturday. "Josh is going to be out for four to six weeks with his hamstring," said Parkinson. Obviously it's a blow because he's been great for us. Even in the first half hour against West Brom he was really good and obviously down at Southampton. Article continues below "It is really frustrating for him and for us but it's part and parcel of football and we've got to deal with it. With the international break coming up, by the time that's finished he won't be far off."
