The experience of 28-year-old Fadi Mansour is a far cry from that of Tom Hanks’s character in The Terminal

Sitting in Turkey’s biggest airport watching the Hollywood film The Terminal, Fadi Mansour hoped to find common cause with the protagonist. While Tom Hanks’s character is a fictional refugee barred from leaving an airport owing to the vagaries of visa law, Mansour is a real-life one – a 28-year-old Syrian trapped for more than a year inside Istanbul’s Atatürk airport.

“He was in the same situation as me, so I thought it would be useful,” says Mansour, who would watch films on his tablet to pass the time. “But when I watched the movie, I realised they were dealing with it in a comic way, and my situation was not very comic. He used to eat hamburgers and I used to eat hamburgers. But Tom Hanks was free to go around the airport, whereas I was just stuck in a single room.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Atatürk Airport in Istanbul, where Fadi Mansour spent a year. Photograph: Ozan Kose/AFP/Getty Images

Such was the depressing life of Mansour, between February 2015 and March 2016. As borders have shut to Syrians fleeing war at home and legal limbo in the Middle East, many have drowned in the Mediterranean, and some have been shot on the boundary between Turkey and Syria.

Mansour managed to reach Turkey in November 2014, but instead of finding sanctuary, he found that Syrians were barred from legal work. So three months later he bought a fake passport and took a flight to Germany – or so he hoped. The plane went via Kuala Lumpur, and the border police there detected his false paperwork. He was promptly sent back to Turkey, where he was taken to a detention room, instead of being readmitted.

“I thought it would be hours before they would let me back in,” Mansour says, recalling his immediate detention. “People said they would send me back [to Malaysia], but I said that’s impossible, I’m Syrian.”

But his fellow detainees were right. After a few hours, Turkish border guards told Mansour he was to be sent back to Malaysia. “I said I wanted to apply for asylum. But they said: ‘We have 2 million Syrians here [in Turkey], and we don’t want any more.”

Malaysia didn’t want him either. After a three-day wait in Kuala Lumpur, he was returned again to Atatürk airport. And there he remained for most of the next 12 months.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tom Hanks in The Terminal. Photograph: Rex Features

Hanks’s character in The Terminal lives a relatively charmed life, finding his own private place to sleep and making friends with the airport staff. Mansour slept in a small room with about 40 other people facing a similar predicament.

“There were no windows and I didn’t see daylight for eight months,” he says. “But they kept the lights on 24 hours a day. I don’t know how I got out of that room capable of walking.

“Even now I can’t walk 300 metres without getting exhausted. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be in a room like that without any space and any natural light.”

Worst of all, one of the other detainees, an extremist, took a dislike to him, allegedly attacking Mansour three times. “He used to make things very hard for me,” says Mansour. “He used to call me an infidel, and he literally used to say to other people that they should kill me and then they’d go to heaven.”

After the third attack, eight months into his limbo, Mansour tried to go to Lebanon. But there he was also stopped at the airport, and sent back to Turkey on the same plane he came by.

To sustain himself, Mansour would watch films on his iPad, and he took particular strength from a book by a Syrian activist, Mostafa Khalifa, documenting life inside the prisons of President Bashar al-Assad. He found The Terminal ultimately hard to relate to – but found affinity with the nonfiction book on which the film is based, the story of an Iranian who spends 18 years stuck in Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport.

“I felt that the character in the book was much closer to me than Tom Hanks in the movie,” says Mansour.

Fadi Mansour (@Fadimans0ur) Thanks God الحمدلله pic.twitter.com/YriI31wu9g

Mansour can laugh about this now, because he was ultimately released. Following a campaign by Amnesty International, Australia heard of his case and agreed to give him asylum. He was first allowed to leave Atatürk airport for a Turkish detention camp, before finally being sent to Australia in early June.

Australia has been rebuked for its wider refugee policy, with trauma experts recently condemning the “atrocity” of the country’s detention regime. The Australian government has also failed to live up to its promise to resettle 12,000 Syrian refugees.

But for one, Australia can do no wrong. “I was in Turkey, which is very far from Australia,” says Mansour. “But when they found out about my case, they tried to help me.”