She turns her phone towards me, suddenly shy. For the past hour, Salma has told me about the years Britain has spent deciding what to call her. But when she shows me her For You Page, she angles it away from the strangers beside us.
“Do I doom-scroll?” she says, laughing. “My screen time is like eighteen hours.”
She is 20, I am 23, at Caffè Nero on Edgware Road. The algorithm has identified us as belonging to the same demographic shelf. Her feed offers the familiar punishments of modern girlhood: a tarot reader promising a secret admirer, a girl weighing a yoghurt bowl on camera, Leo Skepi preaching self-love in the key of summer skinny. I had reposted him that morning. Then she tells me how she arrived in Britain, and the shelf collapses.
The first time Salma asked for asylum, it was pouring. She was 17 on a Hyde Park bench, dressed for Cairo in a London January, wearing light clothes and wrong shoes, with a schoolgirl’s suitcase packed for the trip back home. She had come on a visit visa with her squash team, expecting courts, matches, the old rhythm of a life built around winning. She had not gone home with them.
Her first solicitor, she says, told her she did not deserve asylum, then vanished when the refusal came.
A young Arab woman walking through the park saw her crying beside her luggage and stopped. She asked, in Arabic, what was wrong. Salma did not yet have the word for what she needed. The woman gave it to her – asylum – then showed her, step by step, what to do. She called the police on her behalf, waited until they came, then disappeared.
“If I work, I’m stealing your job. If I’m not working, I’m stealing your benefits. Either way, I get blamed.” – Abdulrahman
Once suffering becomes your evidence, the system needs you to keep performing it, and anything that follows – ambition, boredom, a plan – starts to look beside the point, even to you.
Salma had wanted to be an engineer. “I had an apprenticeship opportunity at Heathrow,” she says. “Two days a week studying, the rest working. That was the plan.” Instead, she is not allowed to study or work. “They put you in a situation where you can’t do anything,” she says. “Then they blame you for what happens when you can’t help yourself.”
You arrive, claim, and wait – on £49.18 a week in self-catered housing, £9.95 where meals are provided. For Salma, the arithmetic is not metaphor. Last week, she walked three hours home because the bus fare had become a decision.
She spent almost a year in an asylum hotel before her first interview – “that’s if you’re lucky,” she says. Hotel is a generous word for curfews, food you cannot cook, a room with a bed and no future. Salma remembers dinners that tasted like hospital food: trays sweating under plastic, pale rice, meat in a sauce nobody could name, vegetables cooked past recognition. Once, residents noticed the food had expired. “After that, they started taking off the labels.”
Abdulrahman appears on Zoom from his desk at Safe Passage in a button-up shirt, warm and quick to smile.
He is 28, from Syria, seven and a half years into a British life. His father lost his leg in the war; the hospital treating him was bombed. His family arrived in 2020 through a resettlement scheme. A support officer took them from the airport, put them in a house and disappeared for five days, leaving them in a city they new next to nothing about, with no internet and no one to ask. The first thing he remembers is a neighbour moving her curtain, opening the window, and smiling.
Before Britain, Abdulrahman had worked for years in warehouses, retail, and clothing factories, sometimes for 16-hour days. In Britain, without English, his confidence collapsed. “Just because I don’t speak the language, I felt like I was useless here.”
When he asked to study more English, the answer came as another threat. “Every time I asked, can I study more, they said if you study more than 12 hours, we will stop your benefits, which means you will be homeless.”
“If I work, I’m stealing your job,” Abdulrahman says. “If I’m not working, I’m stealing your benefits. Either way, I get blamed.”
At Breaking Barriers, the employment charity that first supported him, he was asked where he saw himself in five years. For three months, he left the answer blank. “How can I answer this question?” he says. “I couldn’t even plan for tomorrow. My system was built on survival mode.”
Now he works inside the machinery he used to stare at from the outside. Safe Passage, which once helped him bring his wife to Britain, first took him on as a Young Leader, then as an “expert-by-experience consultant,” then as staff. The experience he now consults on was the five-year-plan box left blank for three months; the cheapest thing on the college café menu, bought so he wouldn’t be the only one at the table with nothing.
“It was like running on a treadmill. There is no destination. You don’t know where you’re going or how long you have to run for.” – Ilsa
Mohanad is 27, from Gaza. We speak in Arabic in Birmingham. I apologize for my pronunciation. He promises not to laugh, then laughs almost immediately.
In Gaza, he studied electronics. His family ran a small dairy factory making white cheese; he had worked there since he was 12. “There was no future for a young man in Gaza, even before the war,” he says.
He left in October 2023, days before the bombing began. From Gaza, he crossed into Egypt by bus, slept at the airport rather than book a hotel, flew to Turkey, then moved toward the sea. He had never used maps, ordered an Uber, travelled alone, or boarded a plane. “Everything was new to me,” he says. “I kept asking myself, why am I doing this?”
The war began while he was out of reach, without a phone or any means to call home. Two days later, when he got it back, Gaza had become news. His case was approved quickly for the obvious reason. “It was clear why I came to the UK,” he says. But status changes the paperwork before the nervous system.
He was promised Edinburgh and placed in an asylum hostel with an 11 o’clock curfew and barely a window. For months, there was no heating or hot water, so he left for Birmingham. “They put me in a tiny room and forgot about me.”
In Birmingham, the college where he could study English is two hours away. A monthly bus pass costs £70; the phone line, £22. Every basic thing arrives as arithmetic. “You can’t think of doing anything else anyways,” he says. His father and siblings remain in Gaza. “You’re just thinking about them the whole time.”
Still, he cooks. Friends come because they cannot, and because cooking gives the room a reason to fill. His mother taught him maqluba, maftoul, the rice, the turning of the pot. Everything is there except the taste. “The vegetables are the worst,” he says. “The courgettes,” almost offended.
I ask if there is a place in Birmingham he likes to go. He scoffs. “In Birmingham? Here?” I suggest a park. “No, not really. I mean, it’s Birmingham. I don’t want to be rude.”
For a moment, the room loosens. There are courgettes to mock, Birmingham to avoid offending, a life briefly arranged around taste instead of paperwork. Then the small room returns.
They had come by different routes, to different cities, on different timelines, but each described the same sequence: a rulebook handed over, then a wait long enough to harden into a way of being.
On Zoom from Withington, Ilsa is 24, in a black apron and gold-patterned hijab, calling from the café she opened this May: The Queen’s Cup, home to the first matcha hummus in Manchester.
“They put you in a situation where you can’t do anything, then they blame you for what happens when you can’t help yourself.” – Salma
It took her 12 years. She came from Balochistan at 10, after relatives were killed and her older brother went missing. She went through primary school, high school, college. Manchester became the place she could navigate by bus route and postcode. Then college ended, and the next step everyone had been rehearsing around her – university, work, adulthood – did not open.
“It was like running on a treadmill,” she tells me. “There is no destination. You don’t know where you’re going or how long you have to run for.” Her friends went to university, started jobs, made plans. Ilsa stayed home.
The damage entered ordinary gestures. “I wanted my caramel latte,” she says, “and I couldn’t have it.” A caramel latte is not important until it becomes the outer edge of what you are allowed to want.
For two years, Ilsa barely left her bedroom. She watched Netflix till morning, woke her sister for school, slept through the day. “The asylum process completely changed my personality,” she says. During asylum she received about £5 a day, and a bus pass cost exactly that, so every morning came down to the same question. “So do you eat, or do you go out?” she says. Eventually she stopped asking. “I stopped my brain from wanting things.”
The first door opened because her brother insisted on it. He took her to We Belong in Manchester, where she learned there were scholarships, organizations, people who had done this before. Later, someone booked her train ticket to London for a Safe Passage meeting.
Around the official system sits another one: charities, caseworkers, youth leaders, volunteers. “Without proper state support, this care falls to grassroots and community organizations like our partners,” says Josie Fernandez Marelli, co-founder and CEO of Choose Love. For Ilsa, that meant a brother insisting, a train ticket booked, and a room full of people who knew the route.
Last October, her status was granted. Papers did not return the years she lost, but they changed the direction of the years to come.
In May, she opened The Queen’s Cup, the café she had imagined for years – somewhere young people could come and connect. Now she wakes at six, opens at seven, makes herself the latte she used to deny herself, and greets the morning regulars. “Everybody comes for a coffee,” she says. “Just knowing I’m that person who makes them smile in the morning… it gives me satisfaction.”
“Everything was new to me. I kept asking myself, why am I doing this?” – Mohanad
The café opened on a Friday. By Saturday, the charity she had once received counseling from had asked to use the downstairs space for group sessions with young refugees. A woman who spent two years barely leaving her room now opens one for everyone else.
“Just because I went through the asylum process doesn’t mean I don’t belong,” she says. “Actually, it’s the opposite. I do belong. This is my home, and nobody can say otherwise.”
When strangers ask what she is doing in London, Salma gives them the version that passes quickly. “I say I’m an international student,” she says, laughing. She tried the truth once, and the classmates who heard it made jokes about her tragic experience. After that, she understood the usefulness of a shorter story. “International student” explains enough: the accent, the age, the aloneness, the phone full of girlhood nonsense.
By the time we leave the café, it is raining again. Salma walks me to the corner of Edgware Road. Her shoes are damp. Nearby, she tells me, her phone was stolen on her 19th birthday. Her assailant tried to slash her at the waist. Salma was wearing one of those waist trainers sold to teenagers on TikTok. It held.
“I stayed alive because of a waist trainer,” she tells me. “Imagine.”
After the theft, the only London number she knew by heart belonged to the son of an Arab woman she had met at the gym. His mother came to find her, took Salma into her kitchen, made tea, and sat with her until she stopped shaking. “Wallahi,” Salma says. “She made me feel like I am more than her daughter.” Salma calls her Auntie, but she has saved her in the phone as MUM.
No one official had sent her. No one asked for anything back.
At the corner, we say goodbye. Salma turns toward home, where Auntie is waiting. Britain has not decided what Salma is allowed to be, and she is making a life anyway. Tonight, someone has put supper on the stove.
Some names have been changed to protect the identities of those still navigating the asylum process.
Abdi Declares the SDF Integration Into the Syrian State Complete
The SDF has completed its integration into Syria’s state institutions, a major step toward a unified Syria.