Relief and the new child of the children’s refugee family suffocated in crossing the channel

It came first email. Then, after a month, a child.

In its own way, every arrival was a sharp deviation in the fortunes of an Iraqi family fortified in the sadness that has spent the past 15 years throughout Europe in a state of legal forgetfulness. Unable to secure asylum, working legally, or call anywhere at home.

The Alhashemi family collected the depths of misery in April 2024. Threatened with an imminent deportation from Belgium to Iraq, they tried to cross the English channel in a small boat. Their daughter Sarah, seven years old In the suffocating crush on the plane – an accident we witnessed from a French beach.

Shortly after a year, an email that changes life from the official French refugee agency arrived at the family in its temporary residence in Rovory. It is a quiet town surrounded by the memorial for the First World War and the long coal omnosis piles that are scattered on this extension from northern France. The far -right French politician, Marine Le Pen, a local deputy.

“We know our way now,” says Ahmed Al -Dashimi, 42, who passes through e -mail.

Through the hallway, in her bedroom, she wrote his older daughter, Rahhaf, 14, in an elegant notebook, practicing her fourth language, French.

“It is very difficult. I can understand more than I can speak,” she says in English fluently, her third language after Swedish and Arabic.

Ahmed and his wife, Nour, 35, met in Belgium when they were in their twenties, after they fled from Iraq. Nour says that she, her brothers and sisters were forced to leave because of their families’ relations with the ousted Saddam Hussein regime. Ahmed fled due to the alleged killing threats from a local militia.

Nour’s brothers moved quickly to Sweden, where they were all gave asylum. But Nour remained again because she met a limit at a relative’s house in Antirip, and she immediately hit his calm behavior.

“Love was,” admitted a sad smile, which prevented her from following her brothers to Sweden.

“If I went with them, my whole life would change. It may be fate or fate,” she says.

Instead, a different life was revealed. The couple applied to obtain asylum in Belgium, married there and continued to have three children – Rahhaf and Sarah’s daughters, and a son named Hafam.

Ultimately, the family made its way, through Finland, to Sweden because they were deprived of the right to stay in Belgium. But early last year, they were told that they should leave Sweden as well.

European immigration officials have repeatedly spent that their original city in Basra, in southern Iraq, is no longer a war zone and that asylum applications have all rejected.

But Nour and Ahmed insisted that their lives will be in danger if they were deported to Iraq – a country whose children have never known.

“If we think we can live (safely) in Iraq, we would have gone a long time ago,” Nour says.

Convinced that they may soon be forced to return to Basra, Ahmed reached an Iraqi smuggling gang and pushed them 5,250 euros (4576 pounds) to transport the family by a small boat to England, where some of their relatives had already lived.

Early from April 23 last year, I was waiting for the BBC colleagues on WimEEux Beach, when we discovered a smuggling gang fighting against the French police. Moments later, in light of early dawn, we saw a man lifting a child on a blowable boat. The girl Sarah was seven years old. With more people climbing on the plane, she became trapped under her father’s legs and strangled in the dark, along with four other people.

Ahmed shortly told me: “I will never forgive myself. But the sea was the only opportunity that had been given to me.”

Two weeks later, Sarah was buried in a cemetery in the nearby city of Lille.

The family was quickly transferred to the migrant crossing in a small village south of Lille. There were no little stores and transportation. Other immigrants spent only a night or two at the center before leaving – often to return to the coast to try another crossing. Hashemis remained there for about a year.

We first visited the family in the youth house in May last year. Sarah’s sister, Rahaf, spoke of tears about her “natural” life. She stayed in contact with the school’s friends from Sweden, where she flourished, and won prizes to skipper.

With the start of the months of slipping, it seems that the Al -Wahshimi family has become besieged in a bureaucratic vortex, struggling to bring children into a local school, to receive any kind of financial support or leave the crowded youth house.

She weighs due to sadness, Nour struggled to leave her bed.

“I ate there. I slept there. I sat there. I didn’t have the energy out of this routine,” she says.

“It was the worst year of my life.”

He left the rapid youth house for new immigrants to reel, and haunted.

“Whenever (new immigrants) arrived, they wanted to talk about the sea, and how they got there, or who came. I didn’t want one of the questions to ask me or hear anything,” she says. It compares the hostel to imprisonment.

The family applied for asylum in France shortly after Sarah’s death.

According to the rules of the European Union (Dublin Convention), they could have been returned to Belgium, where Ahmed was registered for the first time as a student of asylum and where they were already told that they faced a imminent deportation to Iraq. This did not happen – perhaps because the French authorities took pity on them after Sarah’s death. But it still takes a legal challenge and several months, to secure the family and other assistance in France.

“It is like a maze. They are trapped with procedures.”

“There is no doubt that they are entitled to help as an asylum.”

It describes the complex regulations and conflicts necessary to reserve the dates and difficulties facing those who cannot speak French.

“All these laws and obstacles are, in some way, to prevent people from attending (as if) to say,” do not welcome, “she says, as she says.

But in March 2025, the family was finally transferred to its two -bedroom apartments in a social housing unit in Rovrawi.

She immediately created a “shrine” of her sister, Sarah, with photographs and souvenirs, including her watch, carefully placed on the bookstone.

“I can breathe now,” Nour says when she visits her hand on her neck.

At that time, the couple was still having to reach Britain, where they had other relatives. But not the little boat.

“Never”, Nour told me firmly.

After that, on a summer day in late July, a long -awaited email from the French authorities arrived at the inbox Ahmed.

He explained that his children have been granted temporary asylum and permission to stay in France over the next four years. Nour was told that she will receive the same news soon. After that, they will all be able to apply for permanent residence, which paves the way for French nationality.

“California VA?” Ahmed, testing a fragile French, says a smile, and he welcomes us at the entrance to the block of the apartment, a few weeks later.

It is a warm Monday morning in early September, when shouts and songs are drifted through the parking lot from the nearby primary school.

On the upper floor, sitting on her bed and taking a peek at a poem by Victor Hugo, she is thinking about the fact that her future is safe for the first time in her entire life.

“I was worried that we’re going to expel. But I am now happy that we settled here in France,” she says.

Ahmed, Tile by Trade, puts plans to open his small company and apply for jobs in the meantime. Nour wants to open her own bakery.

“We have suffered for 15 years,” says Ahmed.

“But now I feel as if my whole life has opened in front of me. I can work, I can rent, I can pay taxes, and I can help my children fulfill their dreams.”

Another reason for the tangible sense of optimism is now rising around their apartment.

“He was calm before,” says Smile, on the voice of a child crying in the living room.

It was not long before our last visit, she gave birth to the light of a healthy child. She wanted to nominate Lara, but the family agreed to Sally. Both they carried deliberate echoes for the child they lost.

Months ago, Nour was concerned that he was “very early” for another child. But she is now swinging with the pleasure of having a new girl in the family. “This means that I can see Sarah in it,” she says, wiping the tear. “God willing, Sally will be lucky in life and achieve everything that Sarah might do.”

However, Nour Sally puts her stroller and takes her outside, after school, for her first trip around their neighborhood.

There will be some, read this, which will differ, perhaps sharply, about the options that Alhashemis have taken in recent years. Ahmed has already faced angry online criticism of the risk of his children’s lives in a small boat.

But after many years of uncertainty and remorse, the family now has what many others still accuse – a sense of stability, and a safe place to contact the house.