Qualla: 2021 English Channel Disaster

2021 English Channel Disaster: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. NormanEinstein assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. Maryam Nuri Mohamed Amin was twenty-four. She was Kurdish, from Soran in northern Iraq, and she was engaged to a man already living in England. On the evening of 23 November 2021, while she sat in the cold dark on a rubber dinghy somewhere off Calais, she was in contact with her fiance, sending messages as the boat filled with water. Then the signal failed. She and at least twenty-six other people drowned in the hours that followed - the worst single loss of life ever recorded in the English Channel, a death that took twelve hours as French and British coastguards each treated the boat as the other's responsibility.

Image: No machine-readable author provided. NormanEinstein assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

2021 English Channel Disaster: Who was on the boat

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. NormanEinstein assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. Thirty people climbed onto the inflatable that night near Loon-Plage. Sixteen were Kurds from Iraqi Kurdistan - ten men, four women, two children. Four more were Afghan men fleeing the Taliban's return that summer. Three were Ethiopian. One Kurdish man came from Iran, one woman w...

Image: No machine-readable author provided. NormanEinstein assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

2021 English Channel Disaster: The night the boat deflated

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. NormanEinstein assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. The dinghy left the French coast in the late afternoon of 23 November. By the small hours of 24 November it was in trouble. The floor had split. Cold seawater poured in. People began to call for help - eighteen times to French emergency numbers, according to the later French inqu...

Image: No machine-readable author provided. NormanEinstein assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

2021 English Channel Disaster: Twelve hours

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. NormanEinstein assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. An Independent investigation, working from later official documents, put it bluntly: it took the UK and French coastguards twelve hours to respond to the first mayday call. The Guardian and Liberty Investigates found that in the days leading up to the disaster, around 440 migrant...

Image: No machine-readable author provided. NormanEinstein assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

2021 English Channel Disaster: What the deaths were for

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. NormanEinstein assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. By the time of the disaster, 25,700 people had already crossed the Channel in small boats that year - up from a few hundred two years earlier. Tighter security on the lorries that used the Channel Tunnel had pushed people into inflatables instead. Politicians argued the cause: Br...

Image: No machine-readable author provided. NormanEinstein assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

2021 English Channel Disaster: What remains

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. NormanEinstein assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. The French novelist Vincent Delecroix wrote a short, harrowing book about that night - Small Boat, a transcript of the emergency calls reconstructed as fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize. The book changed nothing on the water. People still leave t...

Image: No machine-readable author provided. NormanEinstein assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0