‘I came here to escape radical Islam’: the asylum seekers who understand the rioters’ fears

Sousou is a 24-year-old Syrian-Palestinian woman who arrived in Britain a few weeks ago in a rubber dinghy from Calais. Her husband was also on the boat, along with 70 other men and women. Sousou was (and is) pregnant and the passengers all nearly drowned – as her aunt had done on a previous crossing attempt. There were too many people on board and the overloaded dinghy began to take in water. Sousou and her husband were rescued by the British coastguard and for a while they felt safe – until the riots began. Now, after things seem to have quietened down, she talks to me from a hotel in south London. ‘I was scared. I was watching it all on the news,’ she says.

Rioting men hurled chairs through the windows of asylum-seeker hotels and the people inside feared arson. I spoke to Sheyda too, a 20-year-old Iranian student and former uprising leader who claimed asylum in the UK after being shot by police in Iran. ‘Everyone in my hotel is still terrified. We’re mainly women and children.’

Unexpectedly though, Sheyda has some sympathy with the rioters. She was moved to London by the Home Office from her previous hotel in Somerset and was shocked by the amount of violent Islamism she discovered in the city. ‘You’ve got too many people here from the Middle East,’ she said. ‘I came here to escape radical Islam. My Generation Z grew up in Iran with social media and western values. Those are the values we want to live by. But you’ve got some people here who want to spread Sharia law.’ Somerset, she said, felt very different: much safer, much more the sort of Britain she’d hoped for when she fled. ‘Most of the people there were born in Britain.’