A DESPERATE mum who fled Iraq fearing for her unborn baby’s life is missing half of her family still stranded in Dunkirk’s Forgotten Jungle camp.

Helped by the Home Office and with support from Bradford refugee groups and church communities, Sosan Abdullah has made a fresh start in Thornbury with one of her sons, nine-year-old Mohammed and baby girl Rwen who is now 18 months, but each day she longs for official news of when her husband Tahsen, 36, and other sons Salam, aged ten, and Mustafa, 8, will be able to join them.

Sosan has been granted refugee status with leave to stay in the UK for five years and the Home Office granted family reunification at the start of summer, but there has been no movement from the French authorities.

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“I’m happy being here but until we can all be together I don’t know what true happiness is,” said the 35-year-old whose persecuted Kurdish family fled their home in Iraq to get away from the so-called Islamic state militants.

“The British have been good. The Home Office was good but we haven’t heard from the French. We don’t know why it is taking so long for my husband to come. We hear nothing,” she said.

A Home Office spokesman told the Telegraph & Argus it does not comment on individual cases but said the British Government worked closely with the French authorities although there was no average or set time for family reunifications to be completed because each one depended on the unique circumstances involved.

The couple manage to speak on the phone when they can but it is heartbreaking, Sosan said: “We cry. It’s not good for the children.”

Sosan was heavily pregnant when the family fled, mostly on foot and some of the way in cars out of Iraq and across into Turkey where she gave birth to Rwen before setting off to Bulgaria and finally reaching France.

The family ended up in a camp in Dunkirk where they stayed together for seven months, living in a tent and trying to keep warm with a fire lit outside.

Rwen suffered serious burns to her head one day after crawling into the fire, Mohammed also developed a serious ear condition now getting NHS care.

Gunfire and fighting were just some of the other dangers the family had to endure.

Eventually Sosan and her baby and Mohammed managed to make their own way out of the Grand Synthe camp which is lesser known than the Calais Jungle and arrived in Dover but had to leave the others behind.

In the UK Sosan claimed asylum seeker status and they were taken to a reception centre in Kent. From there they were assigned to Bradford.

Sosan, with help from Refugee Action and volunteer-run BIASAN, has now settled in a Manningham Housing owned two-bedroom terraced house in Thornbury where they are being helped by the Parish of St Mary and a foodbank run by St Columba’s Church. “People are good here, but I miss my family and my children. We pray to be together soon,” said Sosan.

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