OpenDemocracy’s recent series on migrant deaths in Calais tied a knot in my throat. Looking through its rows upon rows of recorded deaths – nearly 400 between 1999 and 2024 – I hated knowing what was coming. Sooner or later, I was going to find Zagros.

And there he was. I think. Listed as an unknown homicide, I will never be sure. But the date, place and personal details match. So the cause of death probably does too.

openDemocracy’s series shows us in relentless detail how the purposefully manufactured violence on the UK’s border with France and Belgium is Europe’s silent serial killer. It explains how and why migrants die while trying to get to England.

But I knew Zagros when he was still laughing. I want to tell you how he lived.

Zagros’ mission: to return to the country of his youth

I've reported on border violence for many years. It’s work that brings me into regular contact with people who are trying to cross from one country to another without permission. Many are my age, many are entertaining to be around. Inevitably some have become my friends.

Zagros was my friend.

He was born in village in northeast Iraq to a Christian Iranian mother. He never met his father. The last of eight siblings, his dad was killed in a car crash before he was born.

When he was nine years old his mother took him to visit an uncle in Germany. She left him there, entrusting her son’s wellbeing and Iranian papers to her relatives. A few months later, those relatives drove Zagros to an orphanage. Like his mother, they returned home without him.

Zagros spent his teens in Germany. He bounced between orphanages and foster homes, gaining a native German accent but no citizenship. At 18 he was put on a plane and deported to Iran – a country he had never set foot in.

I first met Zagros more than a decade after he was deported. It was the summer of 2022, and I was in Bosnia reporting on the pushbacks migrants experience along the so-called ‘Balkan route’ to Europe.

I was waiting for the bus in Velika Kladusa, a town right on the border with Croatia, when he walked up and asked for a smoke.

He looked like he could use one. He was bleeding from a deep cut on the side of his head and trying his best to hide his distress. I handed him a cigarette, he smoked it, and since the bus hadn’t come we walked over to a nearby café for some meatballs.

Drying the blood from his head, Zagros broke down. His body shaking, he told me the Croatian border officers had just stolen his bag and his money, and beaten him with plastic and wooden batons. He said it was the tenth time he had been pushed back on this border alone.

Deutschland or bust

Zagros and I stayed in touch. Beyond his hilarious sense of humour, his life story had struck me deeply. He had been on the move all his life. And, despite all he’d been through in Germany, he’d made it his goal to get back there. It was hard to comprehend.

But the ambitions of people moving irregularly rarely appear sensible to those with the privilege of choosing where they live and how they travel. Faced with hostility and hardship at every stage of their journey, the idea of finally making it to where they’ve decided to go can itself be a lifeline. It can become a raison d’être, a mission bordering on obsession.

When that happens, arrival often turns out to be the hardest moment of the journey.

A few months after our shared cigarette at the bus stop, Zagros called me from Trieste, Italy. He was ecstatic. Finally, 12 years after the authorities had deported him to Iran, he would soon be back in Germany.

He got there, but within a week he had packed his bag again and continued onto Calais.

“I realised I don’t want to go to Germany,” he told me over Whatsapp. “I have too much pain there.”

A sudden change of plans, to put it mildly. My guess is that, now that he’d completed the incredible task he’d set for himself, he felt an intolerable emptiness – just as the familiar landscape forced long-repressed memories back into his mind. Together they created a crisis so deep that within days he’d abandoned what he’d gained and joined some guys on their way to the UK.

“Maybe England will have more heart for me,” he wrote.

Zagros’ last Whatsapp message to me was optimistic: “Let’s meet in London.” Next to this invitation he’d placed a white heart and an emoji of a hand making a victory sign.

On Valentine’s Day 2023 his phone went quiet. No more double ticks. Now, thanks to openDemocracy’s new series, I think I know why.

The hardship of arrival

Arrival is often thought of as the prize after the odyssey. As a moment of catharsis. But, in Europe, whatever relief is felt is usually short lived.

Part of the problem is that physical barriers don’t go away once somebody travelling irregularly makes it inside a territory. The threat of immigration detention, jail, and deportation is always present.

At the same time, bureaucratic nets spring up to restrict and debilitate any attempt at self-care or self-determination. Asylum regulations, status determinations, status-linked access to rights and support, lengthy and unintelligible bureaucratic processes: these are the poisons states have mixed into the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Zagros knew this. I think it’s another reason why he decided to head for the UK after arriving in Germany.

Another friend, Fawz, didn’t.

We met in 2018 in a refugee camp in Lebanon. He had escaped the war in Syria, I was a relief worker. We were neighbours for a few years. After football on Sunday nights, we would smoke shisha and drink tea under the generator-powered, neon lights of the camp. On other evenings his wife, Nura, patiently withstood my broken Arabic to teach me how to prepare the dishes she liked to cook.

Fawz was 22 years old when he had his third son. The birth happened in a car because they couldn't afford the hospital. Nura was exhausted by the ordeal, he was incensed. They couldn’t go on living like that, he insisted. He had an uncle in the Netherlands. “If we won’t get help from the UNHCR resettlement programme I will go by sea,” he said.

I hadn’t taken him seriously.

Two years later, in June 2022, Fawz called me from a smuggler’s house on the Libyan coast. He had taken a loan from some Lebanese families to get to Egypt, and from there to Libya. Now he was waiting for a boat to cross to Italy.

It came and he got there. Upon arrival he was locked up for two months in quarantine. “They said it was for monkeypox,” he told me, “but with the right money people could leave the centre before.”

Once he got out, he headed north.

I saw him in passing when he made a brief stopover in Milan. He was visibly tired, and for a man whose vitality had always shone, he was acting somehow different. But the determination to reach his uncle was still there.

“I want Nura and the kids to join as soon as I get all the papers and start working,” he said.

Fawz arrived in the Netherlands in October 2022. He sent me a pinned location from an asylum centre close to Zwolle. “Come visit me so I finally have a good excuse to try Dutch food”, he joked.

A man broken by borders

Fawz took his life on 13 February 2023, a day before his scheduled deportation flight back to Italy. He’d been fingerprinted when he’s first arrived in Europe, and the Dutch authorities had applied rules known as the Dublin regulations to return him to his country of first arrival.

I had known he was in trouble – he had asked me for help finding a lawyer. But he hadn’t told anyone about the date of the flight.

If there is anything that my years working on border violence have taught me, militarised borders don’t stop people. But they can break them.

Living in hiding. Endlessly waiting in destitution or detention. Missing home, suffocated by a sense of responsibility to those relying on you to make it there. Not knowing whom to trust. Not knowing if it will ever be worth it.

Borders are exhausting. They’re designed to be as such. They make people vulnerable and keep them in that condition, wearing them down and adding to the layers of trauma that many are already carrying with them from back home.

Fawz was a brave and relentlessly optimistic person. His thirst for life was worn out by the wait.

Seven years in a refugee camp in Lebanon, four months in a smuggler’s hideout in Libya, two months in Italian detention, four months in a Dutch asylum centre. Just to be sent back to Italy and start again. He couldn’t take it.

Nura delegated me to visit the asylum facility and pick up Fawz’s documents. The medical report said he had requested psychiatric support as soon as he had arrived in the Netherlands. A prescription was issued.

The medicines never came.

Explore the Calais Migrant Deaths series

1. INTRODUCTION | 391 deaths in 25 years at the UK border
   MEMORIAL | Our cemetery of 391 migrant deaths
2. PORT | Dying by the ferries in Calais
3. TUNNEL | Drivers said Eurotunnel ‘a picture of war’
4. HOMICIDE | Punitive killings in Calais overlooked
5. POLICE | Police violence ‘rarely punished’ at the border
6. LORRIES | 20 years of dying in lorries but still ‘no change’
7. BOATS | The path to the ‘small boats’ crisis
8. SUICIDE | A border designed to create despair
9. REMEMBRANCE | 25 years of victims: ‘Your borders, our dead’
10. EXPLAINER | Channel border violence from a UK perspective