Yassir Abdou, who had an American wife and a green card until four years ago, is now marooned and destitute in Sicily

Yassir Abdou carries his life with him everywhere he goes. Part of it he keeps inside a small backpack filled with criminal records, asylum requests and expulsion decrees.

The rest is tattooed onto his skin: the names of his children, his favourite prayers, and the faded symbols of a Detroit gang.

Of all the many thousands of individuals stuck in asylum limbo on the shores of the Mediterranean, Abdou may be among those who have fallen the furthest.

Four years ago, he had an American wife and family, and a green card. And although he admits that he led an edgy existence, dicing with danger and the law, he never expected it to lead him here, marooned and destitute in Sicily.

“I used to watch the scenes of migrants crossing the sea to reach Europe only on TV,” Abdou says. “Now I was one of them and it’s not nice at all.”

Abdou has neither job nor home. He sleeps on the third floor of an abandoned building a few steps from the port. His bed is a camping mattress, rolled out in a large room with no running water or heating. He calls it his “hotel’’. His day begins at the train station where he showers in water that comes out of the pipes on the tracks. He drinks coffee and smokes.

“Here we are,” he says, pulling a birth certificate from his backpack and surveying it with the dull eyes of one who has seen too much. “I’ll tell you my story, so the world will know what it means to have had Detroit in the palm of my hands and to have lost it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Every morning, Yassir Abdou goes to Catania train station where he washes himself using the pipe taps on the railway tracks. Photograph: Alessio Mamo

Abdou was born in 1983, in Wadi Halfa, on the shores of Lake Nasser in northern Sudan. A few years later, the family moved to Alexandria and he became an Egyptian citizen.

‘’I have beautiful memories of Egypt,” He says. “But there were no opportunities for us. And in 2005, we decided to move to America, in North Carolina.”

Abdou spent the first few months in Salisbury, on a visitor’s visa. Soon he met an African American woman called Kenyel, who worked as a carer. They married in 2007 and, two years later, moved to Detroit.

‘’We found a home in the 8 Mile hood, but I did not work and I needed money. Kenyel was expecting a baby.”

Life is tough in the 8 Mile, the area that takes its name from the highway that separates whites from blacks and where gangs divide the city’s drug-dealing zones. “The gangsters liked the fact that I was born in Africa,” he says. “I started to sell drugs for them. I did not like it. But at least we had something to eat, for a while.’’

One night, an incident at a police checkpoint two blocks away from his home marked the beginning of the end of his life in the US.

“Two cops stopped me,” he says. “They asked for ID. They said there was a problem with my visa and took me with them.”

It was not the crack that got Abdou sent back to Africa, but a bureaucratic quibble: he hadn’t formalised his transfer from North Carolina to Michigan before the courts. In June 2013, he was deported to Egypt and was told he would not be allowed to return for five years.

Egypt was not a safe place at the time. The clash between the army and the president, Mohamed Morsi, was reaching its zenith. Abdou wanted to find a way to return to his family in Detroit. In November 2013 he made the crossing to the coast of Sicily by boat.



He was sent to Mineo, to the largest migrant reception centre in Europe. He began to make some money by washing cars used by smugglers to accompany Syrians to northern Europe.

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One day in December 2014, he too boarded a car and went to Germany where he started using drugs and alcohol. He also started stealing mobile phones and reselling them.



“One day I found myself drunk in a club. A German guy started talking badly about migrants. He said there was no place for us in Europe. I punched him in the face and walked away. I found out the cops were looking for me. I put all my stuff in a bag and went back to Sicily.”

Abdou returned to Mineo but was detained under an international arrest warrant and jailed in a prison in Bremen, Germany, for aggravated assault. Once the sentence was served, the German government, under EU asylum procedures popularly referred to as the Dublin regulations, sent him back to Catania where he ended up homeless. His criminal record is an indelible mark, like one of his many tattoos, and reception centres kept rejecting his requests for accommodation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yassir Abdou inside the abandoned building he calls his ‘hotel’ where he lives with his dog, Asia. Photograph: Alessio Mamo

Abdou’s troubled past is corroborated by Oxfam, which has provided him with legal support.

‘’Unfortunately his criminal records did not help him during his battle to get a permit of stay,” says Nancy D’Arrigo, who is responsible for Oxfam’s Open Europe project in Sicily. “His requests were constantly slowed down by the authorities who wanted to know more about his previous charges. And this condition led him slowly to the street.”

Abdou says he no longer drinks or uses drugs. He puts a carpet down on the floor of the room of his “hotel”. He looks around in search of the east and prays.

“Allah gave me America and America gave me a chance. I took it and threw it down the toilet.”