‘I hadn’t seen people smiling until I arrived in the UK’: one man’s harrowing journey from Yemen to safety

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 When 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 r...

By Tom Levitt