Several men who made dangerous journeys alone tell Al Jazeera they have faced suspicion, hatred and homelessness. Names marked with an asterisk have been changed to protect identities. Athens, Greece – Ahmed* was 14 and alone when he first arrived in Germany in 2019 from Afghanistan. He had only the clothes on his back and a phone. A member of the Hazara ethnic minority, he fled the Taliban’s rule, first reaching Turkiye and then Greece in 2018, before making the journey overland to Germany, where he believed he had a better chance at building a stable life, given Greece’s economic woes. He is one of an estimated 1.2 million people who claimed asylum in Greece between 2015 and 2020. At the start of the so-called refugee crisis, some European nations embraced refugees, especially those ...