The mob was growing, encircling the hotel near the northern English town of Rotherham where asylum seekers were living.
Abdulmoiz, an asylum seeker in his 20s from Sudan, said he watched from an upstairs window with other men trapped inside. All they could do was pray and wait, he said, as the men outside began attacking the building, throwing objects, breaking windows and chanting, “Get them out.” Some of the attackers tried to set fire to the building.
“People were in a panic,” said Abdulmoiz, who asked to be identified only by his first name to avoid jeopardizing his asylum claim, and who spoke just days after the attack through an interpreter. “If the people outside didn’t kill us,” he feared, “the smoke would.”
The police eventually managed to push back the Rotherham rioters, but not before some had broken into the building, further terrifying the residents, including Abdulmoiz. He has since moved to another hotel, in Birmingham, but he said the fear has barely abated.
The riots that shook Britain over more than a week have quieted, at least for now. The government has been working to charge and sentence rioters quickly, providing a clear warning to anyone who wanted to continue the violence that left dozens of police officers injured. Mosques, charities, lawyers that help asylum seekers, public buildings and businesses have been on high alert since the riots.
As of Monday, nearly 1,000 people had been arrested and nearly 550 had been charged, according to the National Police Chiefs’ Council. But the riots left a bitter aftertaste not just for asylum seekers, but also for others who felt they were once again the targets of abuse in a country where immigration has become a flashpoint.
Refugees and community organizers said those groups included immigrants and asylum seekers, but also Muslims, people who speak with a foreign accent and people who are not white.
In Rotherham, in the days right after the hotel attack, wives were asking husbands to accompany them to the grocery store, according to some residents and community leaders. Some parents kept their children at home even on sunny days. And people said they were afraid to go to the mosque to pray, afraid to go to the town center to shop and even afraid to go to the park to play soccer.
“Everybody is scared,” Yaqoob Adam, a refugee from Sudan, said late last week. “All the foreigners, all the refugees. And they haven’t done anything.”
Mr. Adam, who was born in Darfur, arrived in Britain in 2016 and has become a leader in the refugee community in Rotherham. An avid runner and athlete, he was celebrated in The Independent newspaper in 2018 as an outstanding member of British society. He organizes a soccer team and volunteers with several charities. (He also acted as an interpreter for Abdulmoiz.)
The riots have taken a toll on the community. Last week, Mr. Adam canceled a soccer game. Some of his regular players had lived in the hotel, a Holiday Inn Express, and they — along with other asylum seekers who had been staying there — had been moved to other locations after the attack. Other players were just too upset by the riots, he said.
He understands their lingering fears. And he shares them. How, he asked, crying, could people try to burn someone alive?
“We never came here to hurt anybody,” he said. “We came for a good life.”
There had been tensions in Rotherham before, he said, but nothing like this in recent years. On Wednesday night, he went to protect a nearby mosque, worried that it might be attacked during anti-immigrant protests planned that evening. They never materialized. And now he feels that he may not know what his neighbors actually think of him.
“I fled war in my country — genocide in my country — to come to England,” he said. But at least as of last week, he was too afraid to stay out past 10 p.m. “This is not freedom.”
The violence near Rotherham was aggravated by festering racial tensions stemming from memories of widespread sexual abuse that took place in the area from 1997 to 2013, residents say. At least 1,400 children were abused, an independent report released in 2014 said, while the authorities were accused of turning a blind eye to the problem. Most of the victims were white; the perpetrators were mostly of Pakistani heritage.
“The narrative was very much ‘us and them,’” said Abrar Javid, of the Rotherham Muslim Community Forum. He said that the report’s findings, and the far-right reaction, “radicalized a lot of the white communities.” He added, “It poisoned a lot of minds in Rotherham.”
For the asylum seekers at the Holiday Inn Express, their sense of marginalization was heightened by their isolation; the hotel was far from the center of Rotherham and far from mosques and halal shops, said Zaid Hussain, an imam at Masjid Uthman, a local mosque.
Activists who support immigration say housing asylum seekers at hotels can make them more vulnerable to attacks because the buildings are easily identifiable and relatively defenseless. At least one other hotel that had been used for years to house asylum seekers was attacked during the recent wave of violence, according to the BBC, and others have been the target of protests in the past.
“People living in these hotels are almost like sitting ducks,” said Kama Petruczenko, a senior policy analyst at the Refugee Council, a British nongovernmental organization.
Phil Turner, 72, who works with an organization called Stand Up to Racism Rotherham, said he led a counterdemonstration the day of the assault on the Holiday Inn Express and was trying to hold back what he called a “pogrom-style” attack on Muslims and migrants. The counterdemonstrators linked arms, chanting, “Refugees are welcome here,” but he said they were little match for the attackers.
“They were baying for blood,” he said. “It was a murderous mob.”
For Abdulmoiz, the violence felt frighteningly familiar. He said he had fled Sudan’s spiraling civil war before he was forced to join the fighting, like his three older brothers.
His escape took him through Chad, Libya and Tunisia, he said, then across the sea to Italy. He had no life jacket and feared drowning. He said the racism in Italy was so strong, he left for France and eventually boarded an inflatable boat to England.
Now, a week into his new life in Birmingham, Abdulmoiz said he was happier than he had been in Rotherham. Speaking at a coffee shop near his new hotel — this time in English with the occasional help of a translator app on his phone — he said that he no longer had to board a bus to get to a mosque. There is one just a 10-minute walk away.
And he likes that the city is diverse: There are more Sudanese, and other Africans, on the streets.
But he is still not sleeping well. What plagues him is the memory of the fire alarm that he said rang for hours as the riot raged at the hotel.
He can’t make it stop, he said: “It’s a sound I can’t forget.”
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed research.
Read More: He Fled to the U.K. for Safety. Then an Anti-Immigrant Mob Attacked.
