Modern-day Schindler who saved 2,000 kids from people traffickers
At the height of the refugee crisis in 2015, 2,000 unaccompanied child refugees were brought to safety in the UK from the Calais “Jungle”.
At the centre of the evacuation effort – which rescued those vulnerable to exploitation and trafficking – was Lord Alf Dubs, himself a child refugee in 1939.
He was saved by Sir Nicholas Winton’s Kindertransport, which took 669 mainly Jewish kids to safety after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia.
The Calais evacuation was his way of repaying a debt portrayed in new film One Life, with Sir Anthony Hopkins as Sir Nicholas, AKA the British Schindler.
This week, the Mirror tracked down the Nicholas Winton of Calais – Ali, who saved 2,000 children from perilous crossings in small boats or lorries.
His real name is Abu Omar, and he is a Syrian refugee who was living in the makeshift camp of Little Syria when Calais reached crisis point.
“Ali is the Nicky Winton of the modern-day refugee crisis. Yet his story has never been told,” says George Gabriel, who helped set up the Safe Passage charity in 2015.
“He’s an unknown hero, without whom not one child would have been rescued. This man who was himself living in the Jungle is responsible for 2,000 children coming to safety.”
When George arrived in the Calais Jungle in 2015 to do an assessment for Citizens UK, he was shocked to find so many unaccompanied children.
George says: “We quickly learned all these children were trying to reach a friend or family member in the UK.”
Looking for Syrian volunteers to compile the first ever list of kids in Little Syria, they found Ali – “a crazy guy in a beanie”. He compiled details of 157 children.
The Citizens UK investigation led to a campaign which, along with the Dubs Amendment, forced open legal routes for 2,000 refugee children to come to safety from Calais, and thousands more from other war-torn countries.
While the rest of Little Syria emptied each night to jump razor wire and climb on boats or lorries, Ali stayed on under flimsy canvas through a brutal winter, begging the kids to wait for legal routes and not go with the traffickers.
“It was very dangerous for Ali because he was disrupting the traffickers’ lucrative business model,” George says. “You can be killed for much less.
“I didn’t know it at the time, but Ali also had his own family to look after – a wife and four kids who had been barrelbombed out of their home in Syria.
“They were relying on him to get to the UK and apply for family reunion.
“He held on to get all those children a safe legal route, but had none himself.”
Eventually, Ali made it to the UK on his own and George found him.
“He was in a little house near Richmond Park,” George says. “I realised [his family] knew nothing about what he’d done. I had the privilege of telling them.”
When I meet the pair, Ali is reluctant to talk about Calais. He says: “God knows, you know... that’s plenty.”
He had a supermarket business in Idlib when war broke out in 2011. He says: “I worked 20 years with no holidays to build my business.”
He adds that in about 30 minutes during the Battle of Idlib in 2015, he lost everything he had worked for.
Ali decided his only chance was to reach family in England, then try to bring his wife and kids to safety. He followed plumes of people walking to Turkey, and found a smuggler with a boat going to Kos in Greece.
“There were nine of us in a small metal box,” he says. “It was scary. Someone shot at us.”
In June 2015, Ali got a train from Greece to Serbia then walked to Hungary. “It took days to even go 100 metres,” he says. “No torch –
11 of us walking using one phone screen light. The route was along the cliffs. A boy broke his leg. I had to carry him and all my belongings. We had no water.”
In Hungary, local mafia sold Ali a train ticket to Paris where he was arrested and told to go to Calais.
At the Jungle he firstly noticed the mud and the smell of sewage. George
arrived in Little Syria days later. Ali says of helping the unaccompanied kids: “Our Muslim faith tells us every one... is a shepherd, so I became a shepherd.”
George says: “No child had ever been granted safe passage, so it was hard to persuade them to wait, to show up to legal appointments, to not go with traffickers.” Ali tells me: “Killing someone in the Jungle is like you drinking water. I had many arguments until the first boys were offered safe passage. Then half the Jungle [said] ‘take my name’.” George says: “Every child was hundreds of hours of legal work. It could be 10 weeks a child. Every day was dangerous for them in the Jungle. Every day Ali was in more danger, so were his family in Syria.” Then an Afghan boy, Masoud Naveed, 15, died trying to reach the UK by lorry. George says: “He was number 30 on our list. He had a sister in London and was entitled to family reunion but after struggling for months in Calais, tried to make his own way.” The campaigners fought on, backed by visits from Lord Dubs and actor Jude Law. In January 2016, UK judges ruled kids in the camps with family in Britain should be brought to safety immediately. The court cases went on. “Within four months we had 80 children safe using the Dublin Agreement,” George says.
“Then came Alf ’s amendment which focused on children without family links.” In April, a second boy died under a lorry. Still the court cases continued.
“We were winning slowly, but Ali’s family were still in a warzone,” George says. “It broke my heart to think what we had been asking of him.” In October 2016, the Jungle was destroyed. Ali hid in a lorry, but it was going the wrong way. He says: “There was no air. I called [emergency services] and said ‘some of us can’t breathe, the driver is refusing to stop’. We were arrested. They said, ‘You have 24 hours to leave the country’.”
Ali made it here without the safe and legal route he helped give others. He is a refugee support worker in London where his children are at school or university.
Tearful George says he can sometimes only think of those who died. Ali says to think of the survivors.
He adds: “Kids from the camp still ring and tell me, ‘I’m getting married’, or something else important. I’m still the shepherd.”
Our faith tells us every one of us is a shepherd
HERO ALI ON SAVING THE DESPERATE KIDS