On Sunday, August 26, 2018, I was browsing through Netflix, in a sublet room in north London, when I received a Facebook message. "Hi sister Sally, we need your help," it read. "We are under bad condition in Libya prison. If you have time, I will tell you all the story." Of course, this did not make sense to me. How did someone thousands of miles away find my name? How did they have a working phone if they were locked up? I was skeptical, but I replied quickly to see what would come next. "I''m so sorry to hear that," I wrote. "Yes, of course I have time, though unfortunately I can''t do much to help.
" We exchanged WhatsApp numbers. The sender explained that his brother knew my journalism from Sudan, a neighboring North African country, and had traced my contact details online. He needed them because he was trapped in Ain Zara, a migrant detention center in Libya''s capital, Tripoli, alongside hundreds of other refugees. Conflict had broken out around them. Smoke rose above the walls outside. They were watching the city smolder and burn. The Libyans in charge at Ain Zara, who had been abusing them for months, fled when the sounds of fighting grew nearer. It was never clear whether the guards--or the "police," as the refugees called them--left to escape or join in: many had sympathies with those fighting, while others were simply frightened or arrogant young men who signed up because they needed work, felt comfortable being armed, and had spotted the potential for extra profits through exploitation.
There were still children and pregnant women inside the building. The refugee men, who had been locked in one big hall for months, broke down the separating door. They hoped the group would be safer if they were all together. "We see bullets passing over us and heavy weapons in the street," my new contact typed, before sending me photos he said were from that day. One, taken through a window, showed vehicles with anti-aircraft guns visible outside the center''s gates. Another was an image of himself: an emaciated-looking 28-year-old sitting on the ground with three young children. Everyone inside the building was unarmed and defenseless: stick thin after months with maybe a meal a day, sometimes nothing. Their bodies were scarred from torture and beatings, inflicted both by the guards who had just left and the smugglers who held them for months or years before they arrived in Ain Zara.
The war raging outside had been coming for a long time, and these people needed help--any help, even if it was a journalist in a faraway country with little to offer. "If there is any United Nations Refugee Agency or human rights organizations near you, contact them. Since yesterday we haven''t eaten any food," messaged the man. "If you have a page post something on that about this situation." He said he came from Eritrea, a repressive country in the Horn of Africa where citizens are forced into unending military service by the ruling dictatorship. He had breached two borders, survived kidnapping by traffickers, and traveled nearly 3,000 kilometers to get to Libya. Like everyone else with him, the man then tried to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe but was caught and incarcerated. Now they were in trouble.
They had one phone between hundreds that the detainees had kept hidden for months. He said it was the phone a smuggler gave him to bring on board the rubber boat so they could call for rescue once it inevitably began to sink. The European Union was responsible for the situation they were now in--it was Europe that had forced them back. I spent the next twenty-four hours doing all I could to verify his story. I asked for photos of his surroundings, videos, selfies, GPS locations, and contact details for his family members. I knew people in Libya, and they confirmed there was conflict in the suburb they were in. I called him numerous times. As I requested more and more detail, the man I was speaking to told me how, before the fighting got bad, detainees had regularly been taken from the detention center and forced to work like slaves in the homes of wealthy Libyans.
Women were raped, and Christians targeted for particular abuse--violently assaulted while their crucifixes were ripped from their necks. Some mornings, around 3:00 a.m., the armed Libyan guards would call hundreds of detainees out to be "counted," sadistically making them stand in the cold for hours. They probably were not aware, but this ordeal echoed Appellplatz , the early morning roll calls Nazis used to do in concentration camps--a grim ritual carried out with the aim of intimidating and humiliating prisoners. Despite the UN saying its staff had regular access to the centers, that did not seem to be true. Many detainees who had fled war or dictatorships were never even registered as refugees. That meant there was no list of their names anywhere.
They were terrified of being sold back to smugglers, who torture migrants until their families pay hefty ransoms. They were begging to be saved. I had stumbled, inadvertently, on a human rights disaster of epic proportions. There were eight pregnant women and roughly twenty babies and toddlers among the Ain Zara group. As the man and I spoke on the phone, bombs exploded nearby, and I heard the sounds of shrieking. "Now everyone is disturbed, it is becoming worse and worse . Look at the women and children, you can post this video for the European people to know." Frantically, I searched for an answer.
I contacted the UN and international aid organizations working in Libya, but they said it was too dangerous for their staff to act ("In Libya today, everybody is at risk, so not an easy situation," one aid worker responded, showing a callous pragmatism I was to encounter again and again). I emailed editors asking whether they would publish a report, but I was a freelancer, and--as often happens--replies were slow. Feeling unmoored and useless, I began to post screenshots of my messages with the refugees on Twitter, where they were quickly shared, garnering tens of thousands of views, and then hundreds of thousands. Within months, their words would reach millions. "There''s no food, no water. The children are crying. We are suffering, especially the children. We haven''t slept in two days.
We are waiting for some miracle. Tell them the people are dying here." Time stretched out for me, with sleepless nights and nerve-racking days measured in countless moments laden with danger. I barely left the sparse room I was renting, except when I was picked up by a taxi to do TV and radio interviews after BBC producers spotted my Twitter updates. Online, there was a cascade of retweets and likes and shares, but in Ain Zara nothing changed. The refugees would turn off the phone to conserve its battery, silence suddenly interrupted by a flurry of messages at any new development. Eventually, buses arrived. Was this salvation? At first, we did not know if their drivers were Libyan authorities or smugglers (I would later learn there is not always much to distinguish the two).
Armed men in uniform said they were taking the detainees to a different area, which was--at least at that moment--farther from the front line. Then, about fifty hours after I received the first message, I watched through WhatsApp as the GPS location of the man''s phone edged across the city. I used it to update the refugees on where they were. "To your left, you will see the University of Tripoli," I remember typing, and they responded excitedly when they spotted its modern facade. For many of the passengers on board, this was the first time they had seen the city in daylight. The buses and their occupants reached another compound. Worried that they might have been transferred to a smuggler''s den, my main contact asked me if it was a detention center under the control of Libya''s Tripoli-based government. I, in turn, emailed my new UN sources, who told me yes, it was.
Inside, there were already around seventy other detainees who had been moved from elsewhere. Staff with the UN''s International Organization for Migration--wearing fluorescent, garishly branded jackets--turned up to hand out water. Those employees would later message me, too, telling me that things were under control. Around midnight, the detained refugees were given cake and yogurt: their first food in days. "Get some sleep, it is enough for you too, you were with us the whole time," read my final messages from that night. "The guys are thanking you so much. They are saying ''give her some rest.'' May God bless you.
" *** What does your phone mean to you? Is it a way to chat to friends or swipe through dating apps? Do you take selfies, send voice notes or Snapchats? Is it a vital source of information? Has it saved your life? What would it represent if you were incarcerated, its little screen your only window to the outside world? What would it be like to spend months or years in the same building without one? Could you share a phone with five hundred others? Would you risk being tortured to keep it or forego eating to buy data, knowing you would starve without food but could disappear forever if you had no way of sending a distress call? What is it like to watch innocent people being shot through Facebook messenger? How would you feel listening to their faltering voices as they mentally and physically withered away? That''s what I was going to discover. Originally, I believed these first contacts in Libya were an anomaly, the isolated victims of an accidental oversight. Once these pe.