The story of 7-year-old Rola Al Mayali, who drowned whereas her household was attempting to cross to England – Cyber Tech

A blue Kiki cuddle toy was laid on the bottom. Alongside, bouquets of roses, daffodils and tulips had been positioned. On the southern finish of the brand new Grande-Synthe cemetery in northern France, subsequent to a secondary highway and beneath a high-voltage energy line, the physique of little Rola Al Mayali now lies. Born in 2016 in Iraq, she drowned on Sunday, March 3, within the Aa canal close to Watten, as her mother and father had been trying to succeed in England.

The small river fishing boat they’d boarded through the night time instantly capsized earlier than even setting off for the North Sea. Underneath the load of round 20 folks on board, it overturned, and the little lady discovered herself trapped within the cabin.

A photograph of Rola was positioned on the earth overlaying her grave within the cemetery’s Muslim part. In it, she is carrying a pink T-shirt with a unicorn drawing printed on it, and she or he is smiling. “She hadn’t requested for something, she was simply following her mother and father,” stated a younger man who got here to attend the funeral on March 7.

‘Our sister was one of the best in school’

A little bit below 100 folks got here to pay their respects to the younger Iraqi lady. They had been primarily NGO activists, who work alongside alongside the coast, offering shelter and look after essentially the most susceptible, and distributing meals within the camps of Calais and close by Loon-Plage. They had been current alongside the little lady’s mother and father, Mohamed and Nour, and her three brothers, Muhaimen, 14, Hassan, 10, and Moamel, 8. The 2 youngest mourned their sister subsequent to their mom, who was greater than eight months pregnant, whereas the daddy put a handful of the soil that coated his daughter’s burial place right into a small plastic bag. A soil he had by no means imagined he would tread when he left Baghdad in 2017, the place he was working as a bus driver.

“We lived for 3 years and 5 months in Greece and two years in Germany, in Oldenburg [Lower Saxony],” he stated. “Every time, our asylum purposes had been rejected, and we had been afraid of being deported again to Iraq. If Germany had given us papers, my daughter would not have died.” “Our sister was one of the best in school,” recalled his eldest son, Muhaimen, in rudimentary English. “It is due to Dublin that we will not keep in Europe,” he stated, mimicking fingerprinting together with his palms. The Dublin Regulation allows authorities in a single European nation to find out whether or not a foreigner has already been registered in one other member state. Underneath this, international locations can then refuse to course of an asylum utility and as a substitute switch the refugee again to the primary nation the place they registered. “We now have no alternative however to attempt to go to England,” stated the 42-year-old father. “If we apply for asylum in France, we’ll be ‘dublined’ and despatched again.”

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