Deport him where?

Abdul's parents burned to death, the country he fled as a child is at war...

- ROS WYNNE JONES

MY friend Abdul Musa Adam was seven when he set off from his home in war-torn Darfur on the journey that would bring him to Britain. He didn't choose to leave. His village was set alight by Janjaweed militias.

His parents burned to death in the fire, along with almost every inhabitant of the village. He and his little brother Yusuf were two of four survivors. The other two adult survivors put the boys on their backs and walked with them for six days across one of the world’s most inhospitable deserts.

Eventually, aged 13, he reached the UK wedged under the wheel arch of a smuggler’s lorry. 'I just held on,' Abdul told me. 'I knew if I fell asleep, I would die.'

Under Nigel Farage’s new plans, instead of being assigned to a loving foster family, this traumatised teenager would have been part of Reform UK's “mass deportations”.

This is how millions of refugee journeys play out. Abdul loved his home, his parents, the animals he tended under African skies.

But he was born into a war - and time and time again he had to move. The little group reached Chad, a country with its own armed marauders, unrelenting heat and scarcity of food and shelter. They moved to Libya and found themselves in a civil war.