Sameer – not his real name – fled Afghanistan when he was just 17 years old.
The Taliban had overthrown the government of President Ashraf Ghani – which his father worked for – placing his family at risk.
“I was doing well in my life, practising and exercising normally,” Sameer, an aspiring mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter, tells Al Jazeera. “But when the Taliban took power … the situation became very hard, like putting us under pressure.”
Sameer became a child refugee and endured a journey not unlike that of many other displaced and fleeing children.
Today, of the 41 million refugees around the world, 13.3 million are children. In other words, there are more child refugees than the entire population of Belgium, or Sweden, or Portugal, or Greece.
That also means that 33 out of every 100 refugees are children, each in need of international protection.
To better understand the lives of refugee children – their challenges, vulnerabilities and resilience – we visualise what the world would look like if it had just 100 refugees.
