The first thing he wants to show is not a photograph from his childhood or a document from his family’s past. It is a room full of machines.
Holding up his phone, he walks me through a video showing a workshop lined with shelves of 3D printers. There are tools everywhere, prototypes stacked on desks, and machines quietly waiting for their next job. At one point, I start counting.
“How many machines?”
The answer comes with quiet pride.
“It’s 30 in my room and over 40 in my company.”
For a moment, the conversation is about engineering, innovation, and making things. Customers order his products from around the world. He shows a robot that can draw with a pen, custom-made designs, and a 3D-printed heart. It is the workshop of someone who enjoys solving problems and creating something useful.
But the machines are only part of the story.
Behind every shelf and every printer is a much longer journey.
The interviewee was born in Iraq, but his family’s story began elsewhere. His grandparents were Palestinian, and like many families in the region, their lives were shaped by displacement. He explains that his grandfather was forced from Gaza during the Nakba in 1948, a history that remained part of the family’s identity for generations.
Years later, he would experience displacement himself.
Growing up in Iraq, he remembers familiar streets, landmarks, and a beautiful mosque near where he lived. During our conversation, he points to locations on a map and recalls visiting those places as a child. The memories are simple, but they carry the weight of a home left behind.
In 2005, after the war in Iraq, his family left.
The journey that followed was long and uncertain. Traveling together as a family of eight, they moved through several countries. They spent time in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar before being forced to leave again.
“They kick us out from Qatar,” he says matter-of-factly.
There is no dramatic pause when he says it. No attempt to emphasise the hardship. Yet the sentence reveals a reality that many displaced families know well: the feeling that stability can disappear overnight.
Eventually, the family continued on through Egypt and made their way to Gaza. He remembers the route as dangerous, but he speaks about it calmly, as though it has become one chapter in a much larger story.
That story is not defined solely by movement or loss.
Throughout our conversation, another theme appears repeatedly: the search for understanding.
For him, faith has played an important role in making sense of the world. He speaks passionately about studying the Quran, listening to debates, and exploring questions about religion. What stands out is not certainty alone, but curiosity. He enjoys learning and examining ideas.
“There is no force in Islam,” he explains. “You can’t force anyone to become Muslim.”
Faith, in his view, must come from within.
“First you need to believe it in your heart.”
That same desire to learn extends beyond religion. When he talks about engineering, his enthusiasm is immediate. He studied mechatronics, a field that combines mechanics, electronics, and robotics. He describes it simply as creating devices that make life easier.
The connection between these parts of his life is striking. Whether discussing religion or robotics, he often returns to the same ideas: understanding, evidence, learning, and building.
Today, he still spends his time creating.
The workshop he proudly showed me at the beginning of our conversation no longer exists. Once, shelves were lined with dozens of humming 3D printers, tools, and prototypes waiting to be shipped to customers around the world. That workshop was more than a place to work: It represented everything he had built for himself in Gaza.
Today, only a single 3D printer remains.
As it quietly lays down plastic, layer by layer, it becomes a reflection of its owner. Much has been lost: His workshop, his business, and the life he had carefully built. But one thing remains, his desire to create.
“The prints are for me now,” he says. “I don’t have customers. I don’t have a business. But I still create. It’s what I know how to do.”
The child who once fled Iraq after war became an engineer and a maker. Even after losing almost everything again, he continues to build, one layer at a time.
What stays with you is not simply the story of what was lost, nor even what was rebuilt.
It is the determination to keep building, even after everything has been taken away.
Where rows of machines once filled a workshop, a single 3D printer now quietly whirs, shaping another creation layer by layer. It is no longer a business. It is something more personal. A reminder that while homes can be destroyed, livelihoods interrupted, and lives uprooted, the ability to create can survive.
For a man whose life has been marked by displacement, building has become more than a profession. It is an act of resilience, a way of holding on to hope, and a quiet refusal to let loss have the final word.
