Episode: 56 — "The Journey I Wouldn't Recommend" · Full Episode #56
Date: Season 6
Language: Arabic
Ahmed is a Libyan man from Zawiya, a coastal city west of Tripoli. He has been paraplegic since 2013, the result of a gunshot wound that severed his spinal cord at the level of the fourth and fifth thoracic vertebrae. He has lived in Stuttgart, Germany, since 2016, having reached Europe via the central Mediterranean route. At the time of recording he had been in Germany for five years.
The episode is a sustained piece of testimony — on the shooting, the medical aftermath, the migration crossing, and the work of forgiveness. He gave it under his first name only.
Ahmed was shot on a side road in Zawiya. His brother Mohammad was driving. The bullet entered his side. Two vertebrae — four and five — were broken. He lost consciousness and entered a coma that lasted three months. When he came out of it, he had no use of his legs. The men who shot him had no clear cause; the violence belonged to the chaos of the years that followed 2011, in which armed factions and roadside incidents had become a daily fact in western Libya.
The first surgery, performed in Libya, was botched. The medical infrastructure — already strained before 2011 — could not deliver the standard of care his injury required. The operation had to be redone in Tunisia. He travelled there to be opened up a second time so that what had been done badly could be undone and repeated correctly. He described the period not in detail but in compression: a body that had been shot was being repaired by a system that had itself been damaged.
Throughout the episode Ahmed insisted that the real hero of his story is his brother Mohammad. Mohammad washed him. Mohammad fed him. Mohammad dressed him. Mohammad never left. The bond between them was not a single act but an extended one — years of physical care without complaint, performed by a man who had been driving the car when his brother was shot. Ahmed described Mohammad's role with a flat reverence: not gratitude as performance but acknowledgement of fact. Without Mohammad, he said, he would not be alive.
In 2016 the brothers attempted the central Mediterranean crossing. The smuggler responsible for the boat bailed mid-sea — a common occurrence on that route, where crossings are arranged by criminal networks who routinely abandon their cargo once the vessel is out of Libyan waters. Mohammad was forced to take the wheel. He had no maritime training. The boat continued under his hands, with a paraplegic brother on board and dozens of other passengers depending on the same uncertain navigation. They reached a German warship operating in the central Mediterranean as part of the European interdiction and rescue framework. The warship took them aboard.
See: The Mediterranean Crossing
After landing in Italy they were placed in a camp in Sicily. The allowance was approximately €2.50 per day. The figure is quoted not as injustice but as fact — the basic arithmetic of life inside the European reception system. From Sicily the brothers eventually moved north and reached Stuttgart, where Ahmed has remained since.
The neurologist who eventually examined Ahmed in Germany delivered a verdict in plain terms: had the original injury been treated in Germany at the time it occurred, there would have been a real chance of preserving function. By the time he reached the German system, that window had closed. His phrase: "Five years too late." Ahmed reported the line without bitterness. The clinical fact was not a moral indictment of any one person — it was an indictment of the system that had treated him in 2013, of the years of conflict that had hollowed out Libyan medicine, and of the route that had taken him to Germany only after the time-sensitive part of recovery had passed.
The most striking element of the testimony was Ahmed's account of forgiveness. He has forgiven the men who shot him. He gave the framing without explanation or self-congratulation. The forgiveness was not religious performance and not therapeutic strategy — it was a position he had arrived at after sitting with the alternative for years. He described carrying the resentment as the heavier weight. Letting it go did not undo the spinal cord injury, did not return function to his legs, did not bring back the years of recovery and migration. It only stopped the resentment from continuing to operate inside him.
"I forgave them." (EP 56)