A trip, a fall and a whole new life
GETAFE, SPAIN— A short, stocky man in a brown jacket is running through a field along the Hungarian-Serbian border, not far from the town of Roszke. In his left hand, he is carrying a cloth shopping bag. In his other arm, he is carrying his crying 7-year-old son, Said. Sewn into the man’s underwear is $600. His name is Osama Abdul Mohsen, 53, and he is a physical education teacher and soccer coach by trade, and a Syrian refugee by circumstance.
The date is Sept. 8, 2015, a day on which Mohsen’s life would take a decisive turn.
On the field at Roszke, more than 1,000 refugees have gathered. In addition, there are hundreds of Hungarian police officers, journalists and camera teams.
Mohsen and his son, the last two people on the field, have spent several nights outside, the temperature just above zero. Said has developed a cough. They had a blanket, but it was stolen that morning.
Mohsen discovers a break in the police ranks and runs for it — only for a camerawoman named Petra Laszlo to casually stick out her leg in a motion that is half kick and half trip. Mohsen stumbles, then falls. Said screams.
Mohsen gets back on his feet and begins shouting at a nearby police officer whom he mistakes for the offender. “That is the act of a dog!” he yells.
Mohsen and Said make it to a grove at the end of the field and by nightfall they are walking to Budapest. They have no idea their fall was caught on tape, much less that it would soon make them famous. Enduring a war Osama Abdul Mohsen grew up in the village of Mahatta al-Zania near the Iraqi-Syrian border as the son of a truck driver, the eighth of 10 children.
After serving in the military, he got married and had four children, became a physical education teacher, coached youth teams and became a coach in the professional soccer league.
“Football is like life,” Mohsen says. “Between kickoff and the final whistle, just like between birth and death, the possibilities are endless.”
Mohsen had come to terms with his life under Bashar Assad’s dictatorship. But then the Arab Spring came, followed by war.
Memories of months under constant bombardment stick with him. When the shelling began — the highpitched wail of bombs plummeting to earth three or four times a day — Mohsen would grab his bag filled with water, matches and a first aid kit, pick up Said and usher his family into an improvised bomb shelter in the basement.
In early 2012, it was still possible to escape their home in the city of Deir ez-Zor in eastern Syria. But one needed money to flee — money that Mohsen didn’t have. One evening, his brother came to his apartment, opened a cupboard in the living room, put a wad of banknotes inside and said: Here is $3,500. It’s everything I have. If you need it, it’s yours.
It was enough money for the whole family to flee; and so began a three-year odyssey. Afamily divided The first stop on their journey was the Turkish city of Mersin on the Mediterranean Sea. They would have stayed but the only jobs Mohsen was able to find didn’t pay livable wages. So the family moved on, but not all at once. They decided that Mohsen’s wife would stay in Turkey with their daughter and their oldest son, while Muhammad, the second-oldest, would flee to Germany via Italy. Mohsen and Said, the youngest, would take the Balkan route.
Which is how they ended up on the field at Roszke on Sept. 8, 2015.
The police have been using pepper spray and batons, although no one has been beaten yet. This may have something to do with the presence of journalists: Some 30 reporters and TV crews have gathered. One of the journalists is Stephan Richter, who works for the German broadcaster RTL.
Richter pulls out his iPhone and lifts it above his head. He has lost his cameraman and wants to be sure to at least get a few shots.
As Mohsen tries to escape the throng of police, the Hungarian camerawoman sticks her foot out and trips him. Richter records the whole thing.
That evening, Richter tweets out the video. It gets 945,000 clicks. On Facebook, a post with the same video initially gets 95,000 clicks. Once the British broadcaster Channel 4 does its own report using Richter’s video, the clicks skyrocket. Richter says the clip has now been viewed between 30 million and 40 million times.
In its apparent simplicity — a refugee runs, a mean blond woman kicks him to the ground, but he gets back up — the video delivers a certain moral appeal: This isn’t how Europeans are supposed to act. This crosses a line. In a moment, Petra Laszlo may have done more for the refugee cause than all the Continent’s admonishers and preachers together.
At the very least, she changed Mohsen’s fate. Spain beckons Miguel Angel Galan is one of the millions who sees the recording of Mohsen being tripped. He is the president of the Spanish association of football coaches, known as “Cenafe Escuelas.”
With word that Mohsen was a soccer enthusiast already spreading, Galan — in his chic office at the Plaza de Espana in Getafe, Spain — reacts like an outraged coach protesting a particularly unfair foul.
“It was immediately clear to me that we had to help,” Galan says. “This guy was one of us, so we invited him to Spain.”
When Mohsen arrives in Germany, he receives a phone call he will never forget. Galan is on the line, speaking through a translator. Would Mohsen come to Madrid and attend a school for coaches? With an employment contract, language course, apartment, the works? Mohsen is nearly speechless.
Mohsen and Said reconnect with Muhammad and together they take a train to Madrid. Miguel Galan has organized a party to celebrate their arrival at the Puerta de Atocha train station. Days later, Mohsen will have his picture taken with superstar Cristiano Ronaldo. Said will even be allowed to accompany Ronaldo into the stadium before a game. A happy ending, at least for the time being.
Several weeks later, Mohsen is sitting in a creaky chair underneath a dim lamp in the living room of a small apartment in a Madrid suburb. Said and Muhammad have gone to bed; they have school tomorrow. Mohsen needs to clean the kitchen, wash the dishes, tidy up, take the trash downstairs, but he’s exhausted.
Officially, his job is to help establish contacts to soccer associations in the Arab world. For this, he gets paid just under 2,000 a month ($3,150 Canadian). After rent and food, he’s left with between 200 and 300 to send to his wife.
But at the moment, though, the job is a facade. He doesn’t speak Spanish.
While his sons eagerly adapt to their new environment, snapping up Spanish vocabulary, learning how paella tastes and how bottle deposits work, their father still has trouble asking the price of tomatoes. When Spaniards talk among themselves, Mohsen can’t understand a word. “It sounds as if stones are raining down on me,” he says.
Sometimes, Mohsen goes to the Getafe sports centre, where a dozen different teams go for practice. But when he’s there, he feels like a stranger. Nobody knows him or says hello. He is never consulted. He is merely a spectator.
Mohsen occasionally watches football matches at the Cafe Marroquin. Its allmale patrons include Moroccans, Egyptians and Tunisians. Arabic is the language of choice. Mohsen shakes people’s hands, pats them on the shoulder and enjoys the soft words, “Salam alaikum,” instead of the intimidating hiss of “Buenos dias!”
Mohsen keeps his fears and reservations about integrating to himself mostly. Other Syrian refugees live in tents; in Beirut they openly beg in the streets. Compared to that, Mohsen is living a life of luxury. Arefugee experiment Mohsen’s current situation is something of a test run, a publicly observable experiment in integration. If he doesn’t successfully adapt to a new culture, with all the support and goodwill of his patrons, how can Europe expect it from other refugees?
Not long ago, he learned that his greatest wish wasn’t likely to be granted right away: There are complications getting his wife and two other children to join him in Spain. Spanish immigration law requires an official certificate that proves family members are in fact related. And it requires proper identification. These papers can only be procured at the Syrian Embassy in Ankara, which has unsurprisingly refused to receive Mohsen’s wife.
But without those documents, the Spaniards aren’t willing to rubber-stamp the Mohsen family’s reunification.
Over Christmas, Galan booked a flight for Mohsen so that he could spend a few days with the rest of his family in Turkey after being away from them for four months. “Said often asks about his mother,” Mohsen says.
Before completely surrendering himself to a life in Europe, Mohsen had hoped to see his family reunited. On the other hand, he says, at least they’re all still alive. Many Syrians have not been so lucky.