‘I was the last person pulled alive from the boat’: An Afghan student’s 19-month odyssey to reunite with his sister in Galway

It’s a grey winter’s morning on the University of Galway campus and 19-year-old Yama Hassani is waiting for his photo to be taken. Students hurry past, rushing between the library and end-of-term exams. None seem to notice the young man smiling nervously at the arts and science building.

No one, except for Prof Afshin Samali.

“Hold on,” he says, stepping forward and brushing Yama’s dark fringe across his forehead. He steps back and speaking quietly says: “I’m like a father to him now; we’re his Irish family.”

Almost two years have passed since Yama left his parents and sisters in Kabul. A student of electrical engineering, he was studying at Kabul Polytechnic University in the capital of Afghanistan when the Taliban entered the city on August 15th, 2021.

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“I’ll never forget that day,” he says. “We started our lectures but then we realised something was wrong. It was very chaotic; it was a shock. From that moment, the university closed. Everyone had the fear.”

Yama is sitting beside Prof Samali, a cancer biologist, as the young man recalls the 19-month odyssey that brought him to Ireland. Growing up, Yama never imagined he would leave Afghanistan and was focused on graduating from university. These plans were shattered the moment the Taliban arrived.

Determined to continue his education, Yama applied for a scholarship to study at a university in neighbouring Iran. He was accepted and, in January 2022, he left for Tehran.

Yama knew about the racism Afghans faced in Iran – more than three million Afghans live in the country – but, with legal permission to study in the country, he was not too concerned. However, when street protests broke out in September 2022 in response to the death of a young woman in police custody, Yama stayed away. He knew, as an Afghan, he was at greater risk of being arrested.

Shortly after, he says he and a group of Afghan students were beaten by police after being stopped and questioned while walking home from university. Then, he says, more police turned up at the students’ accommodation and searched the premises.

“We were all in shock. I started thinking the situation in Iran would become like Afghanistan,” he says.

Fearing for his safety, he contacted his oldest sister Zarghona, a science graduate who worked as a principal of a private all-girls school in Afghanistan who had fled the country after the Taliban takeover and was now living in Galway. She tried to convince her brother to stay in Iran but Yama was determined to leave and in October 2022, he paid a smuggler to get to Istanbul. However, he regretted this decision from the moment he left Tehran.

In the weeks that followed, Yama was “sold from one smuggler to another smuggler”.

“Leaving was the most stupid decision I’d taken in my life. We were being sold down the chain of smugglers. Once you start that journey, there was no going back,” he says.

Hassani spent days waiting on the freezing cold mountainous border, followed by a long trek through the mountains of eastern Turkey with a group of Afghans, Syrians, Iraqis and Africans. At one point, he says, trucks appeared to take the group to Istanbul. However, he was among a group of nine people pulled off because the vehicles were too tightly packed and people were suffocating.

“At that moment all I wanted was to be alive. We didn’t have food or water. We got to a lake and managed to drink the water.”

They eventually made it to Istanbul in January 2023.

Prof Samali says he followed this journey in real-time through updates from Yama’s sister and text messages.

“At one point, we didn’t hear from him for three weeks so we didn’t know if he was alive or dead. We were still worried when he reached Turkey. If he stepped outside, he could be arrested and potentially sent back,” he says.

Yama briefly found work in a tailor’s shop but wanted to continue his journey to Europe. He knew about the dangers of crossing the Mediterranean, but was determined to reach his sister in Ireland. He paid another smuggler for the crossing. He was one of only three people wearing a life jacket out of the 200 passengers on board the boat that departed from the port city of Izmir in February 2023.

Before boarding, he recalls seeing a woman with three small children who needed help.

“There was a one-year-old, a four-year-old and the other was five or six,” Yama says. “She had nobody else to help her, I sat with them on the boat.”

After four hours, the passengers were told the boat’s engine had malfunctioned and were transferred into a large wooden boat. Yama spent the next four days below deck with no access to toilets or any form of sanitation.

“My phone worked but I had no signal to contact my sister. Then, on the fourth day, we heard rumours the boat was about to dock in Italy,” he says.

“Everyone started getting ready, putting on their jackets. Then suddenly, I heard a big bang and the water started coming in.”

The moments that followed remain hazy and jumbled in Yama’s mind. He remembers the boat quickly filled with water and could feel people scrambling around him. He still has nightmares where he hears their screams and cries for help. The last thing he remembers is being pulled through a window to the surface.

“I was totally under the water, it was so hard for me to breathe, but someone pulled me out. When I came up there was no ship left, just a little piece of wood. They told me later I was the last person pulled alive from the boat. The next time I opened my eyes I was in hospital,” he says.

At least 94 people died when the ship Yama was travelling in sank in rough waters off a seaside resort on the coast of Calabria in southern Italy. After spending three weeks recovering in hospital, Yama joined a group of survivors to visit the coffins of the deceased in a sports hall in the town of Crotone. He remembers the white coffins laid out for the children who died in the disaster, including the three children he helped on board the boat.

After a short stint in refugee accommodation in Crotone, Yama was transferred to a camp in Bari in southern Italy. He was interviewed and accepted for resettlement in Germany but still wanted to get to his sister in Ireland. At the time, Zarghona and Prof Samali were working hard to bring him to Galway.

“All we kept telling him was please wait,” says Prof Samali. “If he went to Germany his asylum claim would be heard there and he could not come to Ireland.”

Eventually, in late spring 2023, an Irish delegation travelled to Bari, interviewed Yama and assured him he would be transferred to Ireland. However, he did not leave Italy until August and found the conditions in the overcrowded Bari refugee camp, where summer temperatures regularly exceeded 40 degrees Celsius, impossible.

“When I was in that camp, the psychological impact was so hard for me. I compare that period to when I saw all the dead people in the coffins. It was so bad I couldn’t sleep,” he says.

With the support of his sister and “Irish family”, Yama made it through the long summer months in the Bari refugee camp and on August 23rd he arrived in Dublin.

Four months on, he’s working on improving his English so he can return to his studies and has found a job in a coffee shop.

“I have made lots of Irish friends and met a lot of people who are looking after me. I’m also so grateful to the Irish Government for everything they did for me,” he says.

“In my mind now is to study hard, continue my education and build my future here so I can be a beneficial person to Irish society. I’m finally happy here.”

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