It has been nine months since Mariam Soumah, a 23-year-old Guinean woman, says she hasn't seen her little Sabina. The mother is in Guinea, in West Africa, but her daughter is, against her will, in an orphanage in Belarus.

The young migrant was expelled without her baby a few months ago from this country located between Russia and the EU, according to her account and human rights NGOs that are following the case.

His case has been denounced by the UN, NGOs and Guinean diplomats.

"I begged them not to do it," Mariam Soumah laments during an interview with AFP in Conakry, where she is staying with relatives.

She scrolls through photos of Sabina on her phone; Sabina celebrated her first birthday in November.

Wanting to flee Guinea, where more than half the population lives below the poverty line according to the World Bank, Mariam, who worked odd jobs in Conakry, chose to go to Belarus in the hope of eventually reaching the European Union. It's a route that is becoming increasingly common.

The EU accuses President Alexander Lukashenko's regime of encouraging migrants to follow this route to increase pressure on the 27, in a context of confrontation between Minsk, an ally of Moscow, and the West.

Like many, Mariam was convinced via the internet to come to Belarus on a student visa.

"I didn't want to go illegally (to Europe) by sea. I looked at a map and saw that Belarus was surrounded by Schengen countries," she explains.

- 600 grams -

Her ordeal began while she was already in Belarus, trying to renew her visa. Pregnant by a Guinean man who had also left to join the EU, Mariam gave birth two months before her due date.

His daughter, Sabina, weighed only 600 grams at birth in November 2024. She was rushed to intensive care, where Belarusian doctors managed to save her.

But soon after, Mariam was forbidden from seeing her child unless she paid exorbitant medical bills. She was later imprisoned for overstaying her visa, and ultimately forced to board a plane without her daughter.

"I said I would only leave with my baby. I begged them: 'Let my baby recover and I will go home with her.' They refused," she testified.

Since her expulsion in August 2024, Mariam has been allowed two brief video calls to see Sabina, who is being kept in an orphanage in Minsk.

UN experts have described this forced separation as "extremely worrying" and the Guinean embassy in Moscow, which oversees Belarus, told AFP that it was following the case and had requested "clarifications".

When contacted by AFP, the Belarusian authorities did not respond.

- "How is my baby?"

Attempts to prevent Mariam from seeing Sabina began while she was recovering from an emergency cesarean section.

"At the hospital, I asked: 'How is my baby?' and they told me she was sick and tired," she says, only then knowing that Sabina had been transferred to another hospital.

She travelled around Minsk for ten days before finding the facility where her daughter was, whom she visited every day.

Sabina was eventually transferred to a third hospital. Mariam, meanwhile, received a medical bill for approximately 28,000 euros, and the hospital staff forbade her from seeing her daughter until she paid.

"I kept coming and they kept saying that she was sleeping (...) or that she had gone out with the nurses," the young mother recounts.

Last summer, a woman at the hospital finally revealed to the mother that Sabina was going to be sent to an orphanage.

Meanwhile, Mariam, herself an orphan, was trying to enroll in other studies to renew her visa, but her application was refused.

In July 2025, she said she was imprisoned for violating immigration rules.

"They simply separated the mother and child," denounces Enira Bronitskaïa, an activist in exile who works for Human Constanta, an organization defending the rights of migrants in Belarus.

"Threatening not to return her child is of course illegal" without an official decision to remove her parental rights, according to Ms. Bronitskaïa.

In prison, immigration officers tried to convince Mariam to find a family member who could finance her return ticket, which she refused to do without her child.

Then, one day, she was handcuffed and taken to the airport for a flight to Istanbul, with instructions not to return. In Turkey, Mariam called the woman who had raised her in Guinea.

"I'm coming. But I have nothing, not even my child," she told him, sobbing.