How a boy, 8, escaped jihadists and travelled 3,500 miles in search of a school
An eight-year-old boy who lost his family when jihadists attacked their village has been found safe 3,500 miles away.
Oumar, from Tambaga, Mali, survived violent militants, a treacherous desert trek, slavery, prison and two dangerous small boat voyages, according to people who helped him when he arrived in Italy recently.
Groups linked to Islamic State and Al-Qaeda have killed thousands of people in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso over the past year.
Parts of Mali have become battlegrounds for jihadists fighting Mali’s military junta, who in 2022 forced out French troops and UN peacekeepers who had been keeping the militants at bay.
Oumar’s life was turned upside down when fighters arrived in his area, forcing locals to flee on foot.
The boy became separated from his parents and decided his best hope was to keep walking, joining other refugees who crossed the Sahara desert and ended up in Libya.
While seeking out a boat from Tripoli to Europe, he was captured by gangsters who manage the flow of migrants and refugees.
They kept him in a camp and forced him to work as a welder and painter, suffering abuse which left him with a fractured ankle and various scars.
Oumar eventually escaped and made it onto a dinghy bound for Europe, but it was intercepted and he was thrown in a notorious jail.
He managed to escape again by hiding in a bin, and made it onto a dinghy leaving Zawiya with another boy who recognised him from prison and looked after him from then on.
Their boat was nearly intercepted by Libyan coastguards in the middle of the crossing, but an NGO lifeboat, Ocean Viking, intervened and rescued them.
Some 336 people were on board, including 42 children, and many passengers had died from dehydration or heatstroke according to Italian newspaper Il Messagero.
One of the first things Oumar did after arriving in Ancona, Italy, was ask to borrow a phone to call his father, whom he hadn’t spoken to for four months. He had memorised the phone number.
‘Dad, I’m here, on the other side, in Europe,’ he said, according to Alessandro Maria Fucili, director of CEIS, a migrant centre in Ancona.
‘The father was surprised, incredulous, he said happily, as if he had won the Olympics,’ Mr Fucili told the newspaper.
‘Now [Oumar] is discovering Italy, he looks around, he observes curiously, he wants to go to school. The resilience of this little boy is striking.’
The boy’s story was confirmed by various other survivors of the dinghy crossing who told an Italian journalist he had given them the same account, as well as the older boy, who had personally seen him in prison.
The boys hugged and parted ways when they arrived in Ancona as they had to be processed individually.
He has been treated with a cast for his broken ankle and CEIS is trying to find a place for him in a local primary school.
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