First came an email. Then, a month later, a baby.
Each arrival, in its own way, marked a sharp swerve in the fortunes of a grief-bludgeoned Iraqi family that has spent the past 15 years darting around Europe in a state of legal limbo. Unable to secure asylum, or to work legally, or to call anywhere home.
The Alhashemi family scraped the depths of misery in April 2024. Threatened with imminent deportation from Belgium to Iraq, they attempted to cross the English Channel in a small boat. Their seven-year-old daughter, Sara, died in a suffocating crush onboard – an incident we witnessed from a French beach.
A little more than a year later, a life-changing email from an official French refugee agency reached the family at their temporary accommodation in Rouvroy. It is a quiet town surrounded by World War One memorials and by the tall coal slag heaps that litter this stretch of northern France. The far-right French politician, Marine Le Pen, is a local MP.
We know our path now, says Ahmed Alhashemi, 42, scrolling through the email, a small smile breaking across his careworn face.
Ahmed and his wife, Nour, 35, met in Belgium when they were in their 20s, having both fled Iraq. Nour says she and her brothers and sisters had to leave because of their family's ties to Saddam Hussein's deposed regime. Ahmed fled because of alleged death threats from a local militia.
The couple applied for asylum in Belgium, were married there and went on to have three children – daughters Rahaf and Sara, and a son called Hussam.
The family did eventually make their way, via Finland, to Sweden but were later told that they had to leave. European immigration officials had repeatedly ruled that their home city of Basra, in southern Iraq, was no longer a war zone and their requests for asylum were declined.
But Nour 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 thought we could actually live [safely] in Iraq, we would have gone a long time ago, says Nour.
Convinced they might soon be forced to return to Basra, Ahmed reached out to an Iraqi Kurdish smuggling gang and paid them €5,250 (£4,576) to transport the family by small boat to England.
After the tragic crossing, the family was quickly moved to a migrant transit hostel in a tiny village south of Lille. They remained there for almost a year, applying for asylum in France soon after Sara's death.
In March 2025, the family were finally moved into their own two-bedroom apartment in social housing. I can breathe now, Nour says, relieved at the prospect of normality.
Then, on a summer's day in late July, Ahmed received an email stating they had been granted provisional asylum for four years. Soon after, Nour gave birth to a healthy baby girl, Sally, bringing joy back into their lives.
Now, with a sense of stability and hope, the Alhashemi family looks forward to building a better future in France.
