Salaam Khan had not long ago woken up after another fruitless night attempting to cross the Channel from Calais and was on alert for the arrival of the French police. They come most mornings to confiscate the tents of the hundreds of migrants and refugees sleeping on the city’s outskirts.
“It’s a new day and the same shit,” he said.
They call it “the chance” – to get to the UK hidden in a lorry – and a year since he reached Calais from Afghanistan, Khan, 23, has become used to the pattern of the day centred around it. More Afghans are joining him every day – unaccompanied children, former soldiers and others who have left violence in their provinces but are now stuck at a border they have no safe route across.
“I cry all the time. What can we do now? The British government won’t allow us to go and if I go back they’ll kill me,” says Khan. His family are subsistence farmers and since the rapid Taliban territorial takeover of the past week, he has not been able to get through to them.
“This is our life, I’ve been trying a year by getting on trucks. Sometimes I’m here, sometimes I go to Paris. I go there when I’m tired, when I’m broken,” says Khan. “I’ll go for a week and then I come back ready to try again.”
He cuts the conversation short. The sun was setting and it was time for him to find a truck.
Though French authorities dismantled the notorious Calais refugee camp, and before that the previous camp at Sangatte, there are now other smaller settlements scattered around the city and nearby. Khan’s location has adopted the “jungle” name of the original Calais camp – which suits the overgrowth by the city hospital where they nestle their tents.
The day’s routine very rarely changes. At night they try to hide inside lorries and in the mornings they get ready to hide their tents and run from police to avoid being detained. On some mornings they queue for breakfast from charities which distribute food on the road the camp sits beside.
During the day, they have little to do. Most sit in crude shelters constructed from tarpaulin, scrolling through social media for news of Afghanistan and their families. That was where they saw Joe Biden’s accusing Afghan soldiers of not being willing to fight the Taliban as the government collapsed.
“I have two cousins, they died in the war and we don’t know how – whether it was an explosion or something else. Their mothers still hope they are alive somehow,” says Khan Kochai, a 25-year-old who was in the Afghan army. He learned English from British soldiers in Helmand province.
Kochai spent five years in the army, like his two brothers and his father’s generation, but he left because so many of his family dying for the war.
“Joe Biden’s a racist. America is. They just destroyed Afghanistan and created this war. Not just America – all of them together did this.,” he says.
Kochai is now hoping that the countries that came to Afghanistan can pay back the Afghans who fought alongside them.
“I spent five years in the army, from when I was 17, I was with them in Helmand. I hope this is enough to take me,” he adds.
Mohammed Wali Ahmedzai, 37, left Afghanistan 11 days ago. He had worked as a bodyguard for his cousin, a local politician, but they feared a Taliban take over. “Five days after I left, the government was gone,” he adds.
Fourteen-year-old Jahanzib has spent three months in Calais and has made friends with some of the other Afghan children, who have all come to Calais alone.
Family is a sore point for all of them. The younger ones miss their parents and the older ones miss their children – Wali Ahmedzai spends his spare time staring at a picture of his family on his phone. He hopes that from England he can bring them over.
Jahanzib is trying to join his brother, who had gone missing for two years then one day contacted him on Facebook with the news that he was in England. He originally wanted Jahanzib to wait in Austria so he could file for reunification but frustrated by the process, and sceptical after Brexit, he told Jahanzib to try Calais.
“Better to be in this jungle than Afghanistan, where it’s always bad,” says Jahanzib.
His friend Showkat got further than many of the others. Last week he boarded a rubber dinghy that left the French coast but an hour into the journey it began to break down. A French coastguard boat pulled them back to Calais. While Jahanzib’s main goal now is just to reunite with his brother, Showkat sees opportunity in England.
“In Afghanistan there was constant fighting, no school, no job, bombs in the night. I want to go to school, I want to learn English and become an engineer,” he says.
When he was caught, he was taken to a children’s shelter but he does not believe they will help get to England, so he ran away. The jungle is harsh but at least he can try for his “chance”.
Care4Calais, a British charity helping asylum seekers on both sides of the Channel, estimate up to 2,000 are scattered between the camps between Calais and Dunkirk but the numbers are fluid.
“With no shelter or sanitation they can’t keep themselves or their families safe and are constantly harassed by the police,” sayas Clare Moseley, the founder of Care4Calais. “There is no way for people to claim asylum in the UK without risking their lives in a flimsy boat or being smuggled on a lorry but the only answer our government will give them is to shift the responsibility to other countries.”
