Jamal is a 16-year-old Syrian refugee currently living in Huddersfield, he and his family came to the UK two years ago through a United Nations program assisting families affected by the ongoing war in Syria.

Jamal’s early years were defined by fear, flight, instability and struggle. Jamal’s family originated from the city of Homs, in 2010 when Jamal was barely eight years old, a number of his family members were abducted by the Assad regime, they were horrifically tortured and one of their number murdered. Jamal’s family fearing for their lives fled to the nearest safe haven, Lebanon, as refugees they languished there in subsistence conditions for six years.

In 2016 the UN managed to secure the resettlement of Jamal’s family to the UK, the family were installed in Huddersfield where Jamal and his sister attended Almondberry Community School

Having escaped torture at the hands of the Assad regime, survived refugee conditions in a foreign land and finally been promised peaceful sanctuary in the UK; the family began to put together the pieces of their shattered lives and rebuild a new one in what they hoped was their final home.

Within a month of entering the UK education system, Jamal and his sister, the only Syrian children in their respective classes, were targeted and set upon by a number of the other students with a campaign of racist bullying.

Jamal had been attacked verbally and physically numerous times both within the school as well as outside its precincts. The bullying and assaults were all reported to school staff, who despite taking note of the incidents have failed to protect these children from ongoing harm.

Last month Jamal was set upon and assaulted so severely by four of the students in the school that his arm was fractured. Despite the level of injury sustained and the fact that the matter was reported both to the school and the police, the boys concerned still attend the school unimpeded.

Having had his arm placed in a cast, Jamal returned to school, only within days to be set upon again by the same group of boys who this time strangled and waterboarded him whilst video recording the incident and sharing the same to add to and publicise his humiliation.

Jamal’s sister had been subjected to constant racial abuse by her own peer group since joining the school; experiencing the inability of her teachers to stop the abuse, she went to the girls toilets where she purposefully broke her spectacles and used one of the resultant shards of broken glass to cut her own wrist in an attempt at suicide. Mercifully she was unsuccessful.

Given the failure of the school, police and social services to protect the children, we are collecting donations to help fund a legal case against the school for allowing this level of bullying and assault to happen to so traumatised and venerable a family. The school has granted a degree of evil to be visited upon these children, which the combined efforts of Bashir al Assad, dislocation and poverty had previously failed to do. We further hope to raise enough money for the family to be able to move away from Huddersfield where their children are being devastated.