Relief and a new baby for a child of a child’s shelter suffocated when passing the channel

An email came first. Then, a month later, baby.

Each arrival, in its own way, marks a sharp sinking into the happiness of a grief Iraqi family, which has spent the last 15 years leaking into Europe in a state of legal limb. You cannot provide asylum or work legally or call anywhere at home.

The Alhasmi family scraped the depths of misery in April 2024. Threatened with direct deportation from Belgium to Iraq, they tried to cross the English channel into a small boat. Their seven -year -old daughter Sarah died In a suffocating crushed on board, an incident we witnessed from French beach.

Just over a year later, an email about changing life from an official French Refugee Agency reached the family when temporarily accommodated. It is a quiet city surrounded by World War I memorials and the high piles of coal slag piles that downplay this section of northern France. The ultimate right French politician, Marine Le Pen, is a local MP.

“We know our path now,” says Ahmed Alhami, 42 -year -old, scrolling through the email, a small smile, piercing his care.

Through the corridor, in his bedroom, his biggest daughter Rahaf, 14, writes in a pure notebook, carefully practicing her fourth language, French.

“It’s quite difficult. I can understand more than I can speak,” she says in free English, her third language after Swedish and Arabic.

Ahmed and his wife, Nur, 35, met in Belgium when they were 20, with the two escaping from Iraq. Nur says she and her siblings had to leave because of the relationships of their family with the deposited regime of Saddam Hussein. Ahmed escaped because of suspected death threats by a local militia.

Nur’s brothers and sisters quickly moved to Sweden, where everyone was given refuge. But Nur stayed back because she had met Ahmed at a relative’s home in Antwerp and was immediately struck by his calm, careful behavior.

“Love,” she admits with a sad smile that stopped her to follow her siblings to Sweden.

“If I had gone with them, my whole life would have changed. This may be my destiny or fate,” she says.

Instead, a different life unfolded. The couple applied for asylum in Belgium, was married there and continued to have three children – daughters Rahaf and Sarah and a son called Hasam.

The family eventually made their way through Finland in Sweden because they were denied the right to stay in Belgium. But at the beginning of last year, they were told that they should also leave Sweden.

European immigration officers have repeatedly ruled that their hometown of Basra in southern Iraq is no longer a war zone and their asylum demands have been reduced.

But Nur and Ahmed insisted that their lives would be in danger if they were deported back to Iraq – a country that their children had never known.

“If we decided we could actually live (safely) in Iraq, we would have gone a long time ago,” Nur says.

Convinced that they may soon be forced to return to Basra, Ahmed addressed the band’s Iraqi Kurdish smuggling and paid them 5,250 euros (4576 British pounds) to transport the family with a small boat to England, where some of their relatives already live.

At the beginning of April 23 last year, I waited with the BBC colleagues on Wimereux when we noticed a smuggling of a gang struggling against the French police. Moments later, in the light of the early dawn, we saw a man raising a child aboard an inflatable boat. The girl was seven -year -old Sarah. As more people went on board, she trapped under her father’s feet and suffocated in the dark, along with four other people.

“I will never forgive myself. But the sea was the only chance I had,” Ahmed told me shortly after.

After two weeks, Sarah is buried in a cemetery in the nearby town of Lille.

The family was quickly moved to a hostel for a migrant transit in a small village south of Lille. There were no shops and some public transport. Other migrants only spent one night or two in the center before they left – often head back to the shore to try another crossing. Alhashemis stayed there for almost a year.

For the first time, we visited the Hostel family last May. Sarah’s sister, Rahaf, speaks tears about her longing for a “normal” life. She had kept in touch with school friends from Sweden, where she had flourished, winning ice skating awards.

As the months began to sneak, it seems that the Alhami family was trapped in the whirlwind of a bureaucratic whirlwind, struggling to put the children into a local school, get any kind of financial support, or leave the crowded hostel.

Weighing with grief, Nur struggles to leave his bed.

“I ate there. I slept there. I sat there. I just didn’t have the energy to get out of this routine,” she says.

“It was the oldest year of my life.”

The quick turnover of the new hostel migrants left the children to exchange, and Nur was inhabited.

“Every time new (migrants) arrived, they wanted to talk about the sea, how they got there, who they came with. I didn’t want anyone to ask me questions or hear something,” she says. She compares the hostel with a prison.

The family applied for asylum in France shortly after Sarah’s death.

According to EU rules (Dublin Convention), they could be sent back to Belgium, where Ahmed was first registered as a asylum seeker and where they were already told they were facing an upcoming deportation in Iraq. This did not happen – probably because the French authorities regretted them after Sarah’s death. But it still took a legal challenge and many months to provide a school and other help in France.

“It’s like a labyrinth. They are trapped by the procedures,” says Claire Perina, a French lawyer who helps Alhashemis.

“There is no doubt that they have the right to receive help as asylum seekers.”

It describes the complex provisions, the struggles to reserve appointments and the difficulties that those who cannot speak French face.

“All these laws and obstacles are made in some way to prevent people from coming (as if) to say,” You’re not welcome, “she says.

But in March 2025, the family was finally moved to their own two-bedroom apartment to a social residential detachment in Ruvray.

Rahaf immediately created what she called her sister Sarah’s “sanctuary” with photos and memories, including her watch, carefully located on a book cabinet.

“Now I can breathe,” Nur says, when we visit her hand on her neck.

At that time, the couple still dreamed of reaching the UK, where they had other relatives. But not with a small boat.

“Never,” Nur tells me, firmly.

Then, on a summer day in late July, a long -awaited email from the French authorities arrived at Ahmed’s incoming mail.

He explained that he and his children had received temporary asylum and permission to stay in France for the next four years. Nur was told that he would soon receive the same news. Then they will all be able to apply for a permanent residence, making the way to French citizenship.

“CA VA?” He says Ahmed, trying his shaky French, with a smile as he welcomes us at the entrance to the apartment block, a few weeks later.

Warm is Monday morning in early September, with shouts and songs moving through the parking lot from a nearby primary school.

Above, sitting on her bed and looked at Victor Hugo’s poem, Rahaf was considering the fact that her future was probably the first time throughout her life.

“I was worried we would be expelled. But now I’m happy that we were settled here in France,” she says.

Ahmed, Tiler by Trade, already plans to open its own small company and in the meantime apply for a job. Nur would like to open his own bakery.

“We have suffered for 15 years. Always on the move,” Ahmed says.

“But now I have the feeling that my whole life has opened in front of me. I can work, I can rent, I can pay taxes and I can help my children achieve their dreams.”

And there is another reason for the tangible sense of optimism that is now developing around their apartment.

“It was so quiet before,” Rahaf says with a smile, from the sound of a crying baby in the living room.

Not long before our last visit, Nur gave birth to a healthy girl. Rahaf wanted to name Lara, but the family agreed to Sally. They both wore deliberate echoes of the child they had lost.

Months ago, Nur was worried that she was “too soon” for another baby. But now she shines from the pleasure of the presence of a new girl in the family. “It means I can see Sarah in her,” she says, wiping a tear. “God wishes, Sally will be lucky in life and will achieve everything Sarah could do.”

And with that, Nur puts Sally in his baby stroller and brings her out, past her school, for his first trip around their neighborhood.

There will be some, reading what they will disagree, perhaps sharply about the choice that Alhashemis has made in recent years. Ahmed has already encountered fierce criticism online that he risked his children’s lives in a small boat.

But after so many years of uncertainty and regret, the family now has what so many others still crave – a sense of stability and a safe place to call home.