After years of failing to obtain a Hajj visa, Yasser finally concluded that he had no choice but to undertake the holy pilgrimage illegally, a move he now regrets.
Although he survived the harrowing annual rituals in extreme heat this year, he has not seen his wife since Sunday and fears she may be among the more than 1,000 dead, most of them unregistered Egyptians like him.
“I’ve checked every single hospital in Mecca. She’s not there,” the 60-year-old retired engineer told AFP by phone from his hotel room on Friday, reluctant to pack his wife’s suitcase because he hopes she will come back and do it herself.
“I don’t want to believe the possibility that she’s dead. Because if she’s dead, it’s the end of her life and the end of my life too.”
More than half of the deaths during this year’s hajj have occurred in Egypt, according to an AFP tally – 658 of the more than 1,000 fatalities reported by Friday by nearly 10 countries stretching from Senegal to Indonesia.
An Arab diplomat told AFP that 630 of the 658 dead Egyptians were unregistered, meaning they could not rely on facilities offered to make the pilgrimage more convenient.
This also included air-conditioned tents, which were set up to provide some relief as temperatures reached 51.8 degrees Celsius (125 Fahrenheit) at Mecca’s Grand Mosque, Islam’s holiest site.
Saudi officials have not responded to requests for comment about the deaths.
The health ministry reported more than 2,700 cases of “heat exhaustion” on Sunday alone, but the figure has not been updated since.
Off-the-Books Fees
The Hajj, one of the Five Pillars of Islam, must be completed by all Muslims at least once.
Yet official permits are allocated to countries through a quota system and distributed to individuals via a lottery.
Even for those who can afford them, the high cost makes the unregulated route — which costs thousands of dollars less — more attractive.
This is especially true since 2019 when Saudi Arabia began issuing general tourist visas, making it easier to travel to the Gulf kingdom.
But for Yasser, who declined to give his full name because he is still in Saudi Arabia, the complications posed by being unregistered became apparent as soon as he arrived in the country in May.
Well before formal hajj rituals began a week ago, some shops and restaurants refused to serve visitors who could not show permits on the official hajj app called Nusuk.
When the long hour of walking and praying in the hot sun began, he could not get on the government hajj buses — the only transport to the holy sites — without paying exorbitant, illegal fees.
He said that when he became extremely exhausted due to the heat, he sought urgent care at a hospital in Mina, but he was also turned away for lack of a permit.
As his condition worsened, Yasser and his wife Safaa became separated from each other in the crowd during a “stoning of the devil” ritual in Mina.
Since then, Yasser has been repeatedly postponing his flight back home, hoping it will come.
“I’m going to keep putting it off until I find him,” he said.
‘All of Egypt is sad’
Other unregistered Egyptian pilgrims interviewed by AFP this week described similar hardships – and witnessed similarly dire scenes along the heat-scorched hajj route.
Mohammed, a 31-year-old Egyptian who lives in Saudi Arabia, said there were “bodies lying on the ground” along the route to Arafat, Mina and Mecca. Mohammed made the hajj this year with his 56-year-old mother.
“I saw people suddenly collapse from exhaustion and die.”
Another Egyptian whose mother died on the pilgrimage route, and who also declined to give her name because she lives in Riyadh, said it was impossible to provide an ambulance for her mother.
Only after her mother’s death an emergency vehicle became available, which took the body to an unknown location.
“Even now my cousins in Mecca are searching for my mother’s body,” he said.
“Don’t we have the right to see him one last time before he is buried?”
Mustafa said even some registered pilgrims struggled to access emergency services, showing the system is overwhelmed. Mustafa’s elderly parents – who had hajj permits – both died after being separated from younger relatives.
“We knew they were tired. They had been walking a very long distance and they couldn’t find water, and it was very hot,” Mustafa told AFP by phone from Egypt.
He was looking forward to welcoming him back home but is now only relieved that he has been buried in the holy city of Mecca.
He said, “Of course, we believe in what God has written for them… but the whole of Egypt is unhappy.”
“We’ll never see them again.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
