Crossing the fence: Desperate migrants' paths to Europe

Each travelled more than 2,000 miles, Abou from impoverished Ivory Coast and Mahmud from Syria after Islamist militants besieged his hometown.
      
Each of them made it into Europe the only way he knew how: by land, past the fiercely guarded fence that closes off the Spanish city of Melilla from northern Morocco.
      
Abou Diarrisso is still on a high days after scrambling over the six-meter border fence and dodging Spanish guards.
      
Standing outside Melilla's immigrant centre, where those who make it into this enclave wait to hear whether they can stay in Europe, they tell two very different stories.
      
"We eat well here. Everything we need, they give us. This is the first time since I was born that I have felt good," said Diarrisso, a lean 22-year-old, smiling in a woolly hat and blue tracksuit top.
      
But Mahmud Sheikho, a primary school teacher in his twenties, is tearful and traumatised. He didn't choose to come.
      
"Life in this city is not good," he said. "The bathroom is very bad and the beds are not good. We are now in winter. The beds are not good for winter."                       

Like thousands of other Africans, Diarrisso camped out in the woods on Mount Gurugu, the mountain overlooking the border to Melilla.
      
There he waited for a "chief" elected by the migrants to choose the moment for an attempt on the fence.
      
One night last month, Diarrisso and 200 companions crept through the dark for two hours and hid in a cemetery near the fence until Moroccan soldiers noticed them.
      
"The chief said, it's now or never: strike! I hid my telephone in my underpants. I attached hooks to my hands. Everyone yelled: Let's go! And 200 of us...