After being arrested, beaten and targeted for conscription, Amal Sahel realised he needed to leave his country. But his journey to Europe was fraught with danger
W
hen Amal Sahel* was 15, he and his friends found a long length of metal lying abandoned in the street. The boys thought immediately of its best use: a sword. Over the past year, they had grown used to seeing strange debris – what Sahel calls “interesting pieces of metal” – in their neighbourhood.
The debris had been left behind by repeated air raids on Sahel’s home city in Yemen: a previously quiet location in a country gradually collapsing into civil war.
“We didn’t know they were dangerous and saw them as, you know, this weird thing,” he says. “[My] friend was playing with one like a sword, going ‘swoosh’ through the air with it. I had to leave them soon after because I was going to the gym for boxing training.” He was inside his house when he heard the detonation.
