Aram Rawf's first sight of Kent came when he was dumped on a motorway roadside by people smugglers.

Having travelled in the back of a lorry for the previous seven days, the then 17-year-old didn't even know which country he was in. That was until he was taken to a Dover police station, where he learned he was in the nation that boasts Manchester United.

By this point, the youngster was shattered and wounded. He had been forced to flee northern Iraq after being tortured by Islamic extremists attempting to recruit him as a suicide bomber.

His father was the first person who tried to convince the schoolboy to blow himself up. Aram said no, and continued to in the face of daily beatings while imprisoned in an underground chamber.

It was only after his sister hatched a plot to help him that he was able to escape. But now the former asylum seeker, who lives in Broadstairs, fears his sibling may have been killed, having not heard from her for 16 years.

“I was in the chamber for two months and I didn’t see the daylight," Aram remembers.

"Every day they beat me up, they hung me up and tortured me because they wanted me to accept and agree to do what they wanted.

“I believed that if they beat me to death then I’m the only person who will die - but I won’t kill innocent people.”

Speaking to me inside Margate railway station's café, Aram, clean-shaven and wearing a black jacket, recalls his father's attempts to get him to join the extremists.

It was in the spring of 1999. The teenager came home from school to find his dad waiting for him at the family home in the Kurdish region of Sulaymaniyah.

The youngster was told: "I need to take you to someone’s office - they need to have a little chat with you."

Little did he know that conversation would signal the beginning of a horrific eight-week ordeal.

"I didn’t know what they could want from me," Aram continues.

"The people in there had these long beards and said, ‘Do you believe in God? God is great.’

"They were telling me what they wanted me to do. I refused, I refused to engage so they put me in an underground prison."

Now 40, Aram still doesn't know why his father took him there. Did he believe in the extremists' mission or was he being threatened himself?

But during Aram's imprisonment, his older sister was making arrangements to buy his freedom.

"After two months she had a chance to visit me. She indicated that the next time they asked me if I would be a suicide bomber and I accepted then I would be okay,” he says.

“I thought this was strange but I could tell there was more she couldn’t tell me.

“The following day, when they asked - as they did every day - ‘do you want to continue to be beaten or will you do what we ask?’ I said 'yes, I can’t take this any more'.

“By then I had so many injuries, I was weak and my skin was pale from lack of sunlight. I was covered in burns from them putting out cigarettes on my body so I said I can’t take this, I accept.

“They took me to hospital because I was so weak. I was in there for seven days and from there my sister visited me again. She had arranged for someone to get me out of Iraq.”

It was a journey he had to take on without his sister, and with little idea of where he was going. He was only told he would find safety.

The boy was ushered out of the hospital and into a car fitted with dark tinted windows. They drove to Iran, before entering Turkey illegally.

While there he was put into the back of a lorry. Seven days later, he was ejected from the truck and left to trudge along an unknown motorway.

“The cars were going like rockets," he recalls.

"I didn’t know what country I was in; I didn’t know where I was and I couldn’t speak English. I was walking along the side of the motorway, and in no time I was picked up by the police.”

The teen arrived fluent in three languages - Kurdish, Persian and Arabic - but not English.

This meant he had little idea what was happening until a translator was called in to speak to him by immigration officers.

“The translator told me: ‘You are in England.’ But I didn’t know what England meant. So he said ‘you are in the United Kingdom, in Britain’, and I said: ‘Oh, that’s where Manchester United come from.’"

Once he had been processed by the Home Office, he was treated the same as an adult.

He was placed in accommodation in Margate and told to travel there himself after being given change and a map.

Aram says he was instructed to catch a bus nearby that took him directly to the town, as the authorities "no longer cared that I was an unaccompanied minor".

“I had no money, I had no change of clothes, I had nothing," he recalls.

"That night I had the first warm food I had had in eight or nine days. I was quite happy to eat that meal and I tried not to worry about where I’d get my next one.”

In the weeks that followed Aram tried hard to settle into his new life and began going to college to learn English. But he remembers how he struggled.

He would wrap himself in a blanket as he washed his only set of clothes. For months the refugee also made do with cold food, for he lived without access to a kitchen.

After completing his studies and volunteering with a Kent refugee charity, he secured a job as a translator at the Port of Dover in 2002.

But three years later, he was called in for an interview with immigration officials in Croydon. Afterwards he was informed his bid to remain in the UK had been rejected.

Unless he successfully appealed the decision, he would have to return to Iraq.

“The refusal letter gave two points," he says.

"Firstly, by then I’d done so much volunteer work in the community and was so involved that they said I was the right person to go back to Iraq to rebuild my own country. It felt like I was being penalised for being good.

“The second point was I hadn’t established a family here. I put an appeal in. I only had 15 days to put it together, but in that time I had 3,000 letters going to the Home Office in support of me and over 5,000 signatures.

"Twelve MPs, including Jeremy Corbyn, got involved. They tried to get the Home Office to overturn their decision, but two days after the appeal I got the refusal.”

For the following 12 months Aram lived in constant fear of being deported.

Each week he was forced to sign in at a reporting centre in Folkestone. However, during one of these visits in 2006, he was detained.

Several members of his family are missing, presumed dead in Iraq. Despite this, Aram was told he was being sent back.

A huge public outcry and campaign eventually forced a government u-turn. He was finally given leave to remain in 2009, before becoming a British citizen two years later.

"Every night between 2006 and 2009, if I heard a car stop outside my house I thought it was immigration coming to pick me up," he winces.

"Luckily that didn’t happen but it was so hard to live like that. They didn’t let me work or claim anything during that time.

"One of my neighbours even reported me to immigration, telling them that I was here illegally. Officers came and handcuffed me, before they even checked and found that I was known to them.

“When people say the immigration system is broken, that is wrong because we have never had one.

"We need to have a proper system and a safe route to make sure that traffickers aren’t making money. That would ensure people can come here properly and be treated properly.”

Aram, who now works at a mental health community interest company in Margate, stood to be a councillor in Thanet in 2019. He won, and represents the district's Beacon Road ward.

But it remains unsafe for him to return to Iraq. The graves of his parents have been discovered, but all of his siblings are unaccounted for.

The politician - who was the first asylum seeker to join the St John Ambulance - was able to keep in touch with his older sister until 2006. But he hasn’t heard from her since and worries her role in his escape put her in danger.

“The United Nations did say she may not have made it, but they told me not to give up hope," he says.

"I hope my sister is still out there and she has just changed her name.”