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.
Across the hallway, in her bedroom, his oldest daughter, Rahaf, 14, writes in a neat notebook, carefully practising her fourth language, French.
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 because they were denied the right to stay in Belgium. But early last year, they were told that they had to leave Sweden too.
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 all 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.
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, where some of their relatives were already living.
Early on 23 April last year, I was waiting with BBC colleagues on Wimereux beach, when we spotted a smuggling gang battling against French police....
The family was quickly moved to a migrant transit hostel in a tiny village south of Lille. There were no shops and little public transport. Other migrants spent only a night or two at the centre before leaving - often to head back to the coast to attempt another crossing. The Alhashemis remained there for almost a year.
We first visited the family at the hostel in May last year. Sara's sister, Rahaf, spoke tearfully of her yearning for a normal life...
The hostel's rapid turnover of new migrants left the children reeling, and Nour haunted. ... The family applied for asylum in France soon after Sara's death.
In March 2025, the family was finally moved to their own two-bedroom apartment in a social housing unit in Rouvroy...
Months later, Nour gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Rahaf had wanted to name her Lara, but the family agreed on Sally, both carrying deliberate echoes of the child they had lost.
Not long before our latest visit, Nour beamed with delight as they stepped outside for Sally’s first trip around the neighborhood. There will be some, reading this, who will disagree about the choices the Alhashemis made. But after years of uncertainty and regret, the family now has a sense of stability, and a safe place to call home.
