From an Unexploded Bomb in Yemen to Safety in Britain: One Young Refugee's Long Journey

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When Amal Sahel was fifteen, he and a group of friends found a piece of discarded metal near their neighborhood and, with the imagination of teenagers, pretended it was a sword. Scraps of twisted metal were an ordinary sight where he grew up, part of the wreckage left behind by a war that had been tearing Yemen apart since 2014. What the boys did not realize was that the object was an unexploded bomb. It detonated, killing three of his friends. That moment, he says, ended his childhood in an instant and set the course for everything that followed.

Sahel still recalls the day in vivid detail: the noise, the smoke, and the sight of friends lying injured as others ran in panic. The trauma never fully left him, and it became the first in a long sequence of ordeals he would face in a country consumed by conflict. Unexploded ordnance and landmines have become one of the deadliest legacies of the fighting; aid agencies attribute more than half of all child casualties from explosive devices to such remnants, and children in Yemen are several times more likely than adults to be killed or maimed by them.

The scale of the danger is difficult to overstate. Humanitarian organizations have documented that more than eleven thousand children have been killed or injured over the course of Yemen’s war, with explosive remnants a leading cause. For families, the threat lingers long after the fighting in a given area subsides, contaminating fields, roads and the spaces where children study and play. It was into this environment that Sahel tried to grow up, attempting to focus on his studies and on an ambition to one day start a business of his own.

Photography became an outlet for him, a way to make sense of a collapsing world. The hobby, however, drew suspicion. During one shoot he was accused of spying, then detained, beaten and pushed toward military service. He was painfully aware of how often the armed factions recruited boys, sending them to the front and leaving families to grieve sons who never returned. Convinced that remaining would cost him his freedom or his life, Sahel made the wrenching decision to leave the country he loved, joining the millions already displaced by the war.

More than four million Yemenis have been driven from their homes during the conflict, and in 2023, at the age of twenty-one, Sahel became one of them. He made his way to Egypt, one of the few destinations Yemenis could reach without facing strict visa barriers. Even there, safety proved fragile. He lived under the constant threat of being deported back to Yemen, a prospect he believed could prove fatal given everything he had already endured, and so he resolved to keep moving in search of more durable protection.

His route took him onward toward Europe, and eventually to Greece. After walking for hours over mountainous terrain, he and his companions arrived at a police station, where the reception was cold rather than comforting. Treated with suspicion, the group was left to sleep outside in the chill. Sahel spent three months in Greece, often feeling more like a criminal than a person seeking refuge. Discouraged by accounts of how difficult asylum had become across much of Europe, he decided to continue toward the United Kingdom.

In late 2024 he reached Calais, on the northern coast of France, where he prepared for the perilous crossing of the Channel. Steeling himself against the cold and rain, he understood the dangers that lay ahead in the water. Yet the gravest threat that night came not from the sea but from a violent dispute among smugglers, who began firing weapons as tensions boiled over. Sahel and the others escaped the gunfire and managed to board a small boat that carried them across to England, completing one of the most dangerous legs of his journey.

Arrival brought a shock of a different kind. Instead of the hostility and danger he had grown to expect, he encountered unexpected gentleness from those he met. The contrast with the suspicion and violence that had marked so much of his journey was jarring, and it offered him a first, tentative sense that he might finally have reached a place where his survival could mean something more than mere endurance. For a young man shaped by years of fear, the experience of being treated with simple decency carried real weight.

Sahel still carries painful memories, and the scars of all he has witnessed will not soon fade. Even so, he is determined to move forward and to make something meaningful of his survival. He speaks of wanting to turn his suffering into a force for good, channeling it toward peace and healing rather than bitterness. It is a quiet act of resilience after a journey few could ever imagine, and a reminder of the human cost behind the statistics that define Yemen’s long and devastating war.

Sahel’s story, harrowing as it is, mirrors the experience of countless Yemenis forced onto dangerous migration routes by a war that has shown little sign of a lasting resolution. Aid organizations such as UNICEF have repeatedly called for accelerated mine clearance, expanded risk education and stronger support for survivors, warning that without such measures the threat to children will persist for years even if the fighting eases.