“Please can we take a break,” 32-year-old Wassim asks as we sit in Finsbury Park on a mild spring day. The Syrian refugee is tired.
He has lived in London for the last year and a half but the memories of his escape from war-torn Aleppo, his home, remain raw.
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“I was studying English Literature and I would have liked to become a pilot,” he tells HuffPost UK. “But I couldn’t study as a pilot because I didn’t support [Assad’s] regime.”
When Wassim left Syria, his career aspirations were the last thing on his mind. Falsely accused of hiding terrorists, the regime tortured him and left him almost dead.
In this video, he describes his terrifying journey from Aleppo to London and how struggles to put the memory of what happened behind him.