By SpectaTor

When Khadra Abdile, a 24-year-old Somali woman, was waiting for a tram in May she heard screaming. She turned around and saw a man with sunglasses sitting in a car yelling at her, calling her names and demanding she take off her Hijab. When Abdile finally entered the tram someone, probably that man, started to choke her with Hijab punched her and knocked her teeth out.

“The driver came to check what happened and witnesses described what they saw,” Abdile told The Slovak Spectator. “That driver did nothing, asked nothing and continued to drive.”

When authorities granted Abdile and her then 1-year-old son asylum in 2013 she considered her new country safe. That changed after migration crisis started in early 2015. Since then she has experienced six attacks in Bratislava and now avoid public transport.

Abdile is not a young mother with a child in the eyes of extremists, but a target they can call names, or attack, according to NGOs who work with refugees. The number of such attacks on foreigners vastly increased and have become so frequent in Slovakia that NGOs prepared a joint statement on them. They ask politicians to realise that their rhetoric can encourage such physical attacks.

“No one would probably dare to call me names out of nowhere,” Zuzana Števulová of Human Rights League told The Slovak Spectator. “However, some people got impression that they can do it to our clients without a fear of punishment because this is current discourse in our society.”

Aggressive thief

Abdile has been living in Bratislava for three years only with her son. Her husband stayed at home. She travels daily around Bratislava to take classes in the Slovak language and to take her son to kindergarten. Her problems started after Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015.

First, someone robbed her and she lost welfare money together with documents which she need as refugee. Police then fined her for losing her and her son’s ID.

A few weeks later some woman followed her with open knife when she was taking her son home from playground. After Abdile started to run, the woman started to chase her and disappeared only after Abdile entered candy store where her friends were.

“I didn’t have time to call the police,” Abdile said. “My son couldn’t walk then so I was holding him in my hands.”

A third incident happened when she was entering bus in front of presidential palace. Again someone tried to rob her. She noticed man’s hand in her purse and tried to stop him but thief was stronger and pushed her out of the bus. She screamed and called for help but the response surprised her.

“Common thieves try to escape when they are done,” Abdile said. “This one started to yell at me that I’m black, dirty and it was obvious that he is not afraid.”

Also the response of eyewitnesses, who stood around and did nothing, shocked her. Only one woman told her in English to go to police station.

When giving testimony at police station police officer asked her if she knows what happened in Brussels. She responded that she did not have time to check news. It was March 22, a day when terrorists bombed Brussels’ airport and metro station.

Throwing stones

A few days after tram attack Abdile took her son to the doctor. Seeing his mother with bleeding neck and struggling to chew he was troubled and eventually got sick. Abdile was afraid to use public transportation therefore Emília Trepáčová, a social worker from Slovak Catholic Charity, gave her a ride.

When they got out of the car in front of the general practitioner’s building a man walked behind the building and took some stones. He started to throw them at Abdile and her son therefore the pair ran to take cover in the building.

Trepáčová stood at the doors to prevent the man from entering.

“He yelled at me why I’m protecting them; he called me names and spit on my face twice,” Trepáčová told The Slovak Spectator. “When I pushed him he struck me twice.”

That was too much for a man sitting in a car few meters from the scene. He approached attacker and started to argue with him. After a while attacker ran away. Later he told Trepáčová that he did not want to give testimony to police and he helped her only because he is father and husband and could not stand seeing someone hurting woman.

Read more: Extremists repeatedly attack Somali woman

Source: Spectator