‘They wanted me to fight, and I knew I had to leave, or die.’ My translator, a former English teacher from Syria, was explaining how, after the army knocked on his door one day, he had fled the country and moved more than 2,000 miles to Liverpool. This was 2018, the bloody civil war was raging.
Everyone we met in the north west – an old couple, a young family, single men – had said the same thing. As soon as it was safe, they just wanted to go home. Now, three years on, thousands of their countrymen are in a far more precarious situation, sleeping rough in tents and makeshift shelters on the Belarusian border, as temperatures plummet to below freezing at night.
Earlier this week, Polish police officers and soldiers deployed flash-bang grenades, riot shields and fired water cannons at the crowds as they tried to breach the barbed wire fence. The groups, which include women and children, are part of a far larger battle being fought between Belarus and the EU.
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