As Said Norzai was crossing the mountainous border between Iran and Turkey, somebody began shooting. The group of 100 people scattered. Norzai was holding the hand of his nine-year-old son, Wali Khan, and so they ran and hid together. When they emerged after the firefight, there was no sign of Said’s wife and their other six children, aged between 12 and two. He hasn’t heard news of them since.
Norzai left his home in Afghanistan in 2015 when fighting between the Taliban and the government made life in his home in Kunduz province unliveable. After a perilous journey across Europe, he eventually made it to the UK, where he claimed asylum. If he had known what would befall his family on the journey, Norzai says, he would have risked life under the Taliban.
In 2016, 1.2 million people claimed asylum in Europe. In 2015, it was 1.4 million. That’s over five times more people than 10 years earlier.
The Guardian has reported these extraordinary journeys and people’s reasons for making them since this most recent migration crisis began. But there is another story to tell: how have the several million people who have arrived in Europe in recent years, desperately hoping to build a new life, fared once they are here?
This is the idea behind the New Arrivals, a long-term project we launched this week in conjunction with leading European news organisations Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El País. Each newspaper will follow a family of refugees, asylum seekers or recent migrants in their respective countries for a year, charting their progress as they arrive in Europe and attempt to make it their home. If you’d like to receive email updates on it, you can sign up here.
This project seems a natural extension of the Guardian’s reporting in the past few years. It also feels crucial at this time – following the divisive rhetoric of the Brexit campaign, and with forthcoming elections in Germany and France in which immigration promises to be a crucial issue – to be bearing witness to the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees.
That is where I come in. I’m an editor on the Special Projects desk, which coordinates longer-term news projects within the Guardian. We run, or support the main news team in running, series such as This is the NHS; Millennials: the trials of Generation Y; The UN at 70; Technology in Africa; Transgender healthcare; The New Retirement; the Half-full series and others. I was assigned to this New Arrivals project as a commissioning editor – planning our content and commissioning stories from reporters, specialists and correspondents – and as the lead reporter for the series.
My first task was to find a family whose story we could tell. So I spent much of the winter travelling to cities around Britain where large numbers of asylum seekers live. I crisscrossed the country from Coventry to Cardiff, Liverpool to Leicester. I sat in church halls in Sheffield and community halls in St Helens, I ate Syrian food in Nottingham and drank Afghan tea in Peterborough. Along the way, I met dozens of people seeking sanctuary in Britain, as well as the communities, charities, lawyers, case workers and faith groups trying to help them.
The idea seemed simple enough. We would find and then follow a refugee family from Iran, Iraq, Pakistan or Afghanistan – the four countries from which asylum seekers in Britain most commonly come – who had arrived in the country within the past year.
The reality was more difficult.
To begin with, the commitment we were seeking was not insignificant. We wanted a family to allow us into their lives with a video camera and to tell their story over the course of a year. The people we were dealing with were vulnerable, sometimes traumatised, and in precarious situations. Many wanted to talk but were afraid to be identified for fears of reprisals for family back home.
One man, a burly 32-year-old Afghan who had the most extraordinary story of being kidnapped by the Taliban only to escape by stealing his captor’s Kalashnikov, told me he could only speak anonymously because he feared the Taliban would kill him on the streets of Leicester.
But the most common reason people cited for not speaking was their fear that doing so might harm their asylum claim with the Home Office. An Iraqi Kurdish man I met in St Helens told me his six-year-old daughter, who is too young to understand that her family are asylum seekers or what the Home Office is, is not too young not to sense her parents’ fear of it. When she wants to tease her father, she tells him when his phone rings that it is the Home Office calling.
It says something about the nature of the system when asylum seekers live in such terror of it – and we will be exploring the complexities and vagaries of the asylum process in news stories and investigations throughout the series.
There is no such thing as a typical asylum seeker, but in many ways the experience of Said and Wali Khan Norzai is representative of many in the UK. They’re Afghan, the fourth most common nationality for asylum seekers in Britain in 2016. They’re male, as are roughly 70% of all those who seek sanctuary in the country . And they have arrived here without their entire family; sadly, it is rare for families to arrive intact.
We will follow their story over the next year. We will watch them navigate a complex asylum system and see how they integrate into society. We don’t know where this story will take us – or whether they will ultimately be allowed to stay in Britain. Just days before the launch of the series, Norzai learned his asylum claim had been rejected, as happens in the case of two-thirds of Afghans. We don’t know if he will be able to appeal against the decision, and if he is, whether an appeal will be successful.
There may come a point when we can no longer continue telling his story in Britain, because he may be forced to leave.
But this is the experience of so many who come to Britain seeking refuge and so it is an important one to tell, even if it does not have a happy ending. And through it all, we will follow Norzai’s search for his missing family, who haunt him and his son.
