I am of S yrian nationality , our country has been in an ongoing war for 10 years, I am 24 years old now , so when the war started I was 1 4 years old. I have no t lived my childhood, during the period when children should be playing, my friends and I would be running because of the sounds of war.
The war was ongoing for 5 years in the area I am from. I was also detained and tortured because of a F acebook post. The sounds I heard while in prison where even harder than the physical torture I received. After that, I had to leave Syria in And then when we left, the abuse, torture and mistreatment continued on the way. In Libya, some were captured and were blackmailed for money and possessions. Some were beaten up and enslaved. I gave them what they wanted because I did not want to be tortured again, I escaped from torture so I did not want this to happen again and anyway I only had little money on me.
We faced one bandit after the other wherever we went, from Libya to Algeria to Morrocco. We walked in the desert, and sometimes there was no food and no wa ter. We stayed in Libya for 15 days, then 1 week in Algeria, then 3 weeks in Morrocco. After that we tried to reach M e li l la Spain. We tried to cross multiple times, but some would get beaten up, we were not treated like human beings. My friend tried to jump over the fence to get there, but he fell and broke his back so he had to stay in Morrocco.
When we got to M e li l la, we saw huge numbers of people from everywhere, all being kept i n tents in the detention camp.
Each tent had around people. When it was time to get food, the queue for food was for around hours because of the huge numbers. Because of bandits, it was difficult to cross back to Algeria or to mainland Europe. A friend of mine got stabbed by the m, anothe r got beaten up and his arm got broken by them. It was hard to believe that what we saw in Mallela is happening in Europe. From there we went to Dunkirk, where I stayed for 5 months. We used to go looking for firewood to cook our food.
